cupoftrembling

[cupoftrembling]

Alterity

Jamais vu.

Jamais vu is not a new concept, the idea of knowing without knowing. To know which way the sun rises, without ever once seeing the dawn, that is jamais vu. To hear the child’s melody on the air is jamais vu. To know where, just right, to sneak the knife in is jamais vu. Every culture across the Askaven Continent is aware of jamais vu. Of course, there are different reasons why one experiences it. Some theorize that there is a collective weft of the mind that connects each and every one of us. The idea is that, when we think something, it joins the Grand Weft of Isosa. A weft that we all have access to and can pull resources from. A memory bank that allows, across time and space, a connection between one another. 

Others think that at every moment we constantly extrude harmonic striations; the way our bodies interact with the air sends out signals to anything and everything, constantly displaying our true intentions to one another. Those who follow such ideas say that jamais vu is just us picking up on the harmonic resonance of one another, intuiting one’s desire as our own. When I focus and know, beyond knowing, the story the man who sits in front of me was told by his father when he was a child, it is simply me picking up on his body language and pheromones at any given point. That these jamais vu’s are just biological impulses that we are, to one degree or another, receptive to.

I am not here to debate the merits of which theory is correct.

Because they all call the experience jamais vu. A Mariposian word. At the center of this concept, like at the center of all things, is Mariposa. Derived from the name of a fallen angel of Auleen, the words “jamais vu” have infected the very discussion of the topic. Whenever I broach one of my contemporaries, how few they are indeed, they discuss the merits of the different social philosophies surrounding jamais vu. But the language, it does not matter. Empyrial, Mariposian, Celestial, Eastern, Algeran. Each of them talk about the concept using the cage of language that is jamais vu. 

“Why?” I ask them, hands wrapped around a leather bound journal. “Surely, your own tongue must have the words for jamais vu?” I plead with them, my eyes wet with concern and with frustration.

They blink back at me, their own eyes glazed over with some sort of deep understanding. As if whatever words, whatever concept, has been kept from them, locked away in the vault by the supplanting arcane taradiddle. “I’m sure there are.” They rationalize, “But what else could it be but jamais vu?”

Jamais vu: A thief of a concept that makes a home in places it is not welcome. They know, without knowing, that the Mariposian word is the most accurate, most well conceived word for what we experience every day. 

What Reva experienced on that boat, in the cold, salt brined waters off the coast of Ashosh Ai could only be described as jamais vu. 

There were four people on that boat that dreadful day. Reva was the abjur of the group, the one specialized in defensive and negative magics. Herah was the muscle who wore a scar across the bridge of his nose. Formen of the Wastes was a prevoker whose own magics suffused sinew and bone. And Mirabell was the pretty little skald from foreign shores.

And then there was Dawn.

She sat at the back of the boat, hand on the rudder of their all but silent vessel. Salt soaked water stuck to the edge of her brow, slicking her blonde hair back tight against her scalp. Each of these thieves were all dressed in Dawn’s favorite shade of purple, mirrored in outfit by their patron. She wore a grin, pernicious and deceptive, wide on her face. It didn’t sit right to Reva, who had seen that smile several times. It was almost as if her mouth was too wide, or too deep, for her face. Ravenous, as the Wolf had often been described to be. Her teeth too sharp, her tongue too dextrous. Dawn’s mouth was something to fall into, to be ensorcelled by. 

Dawn’s other hand, the one resting on her slacks, had a single, plain gold band around her ring finger. She fiddled with it with her thumb. A wedding ring, a Mariposian practice. Dawn was not married, or if she was she gave no care or concern for her wife, as Reva’s own experience had shown her. But the noise that Dawn made as she rubbed that ring drilled a thought into Reva’s mind. It was louder than the engine, louder than the crashing of waves, louder than the prattling rainfall. It was a clear moment, obliterative of any other thought or sense that might have been had.

It was a sunny day in Mariposa, and the air was thick with the smell of lavender berries. Dawn was walking, hand in hand, with a woman who Reva had never seen before. Long, auburn hair and skin that smelled like an old book. History. She knew, beyond knowing, that this unfamiliar woman usually wore her hair up in a small, tight bun, but that Dawn liked it down. Dawn reached down to a stand, picked up an apple, her daughter’s favorite, and placed it in a small, handspun wicker basket. She was smiling in a way that was not her own smile, a smile that looked unfamiliar to Reva. Something natural, something more akin to the human form. The woman smiled back. And then, she was gone.

But Dawn, she remained smiling the same way that she had, moments before the not-quite-a-memory had wormed its way into Reva’s mind. Her eyes had narrowed, as if she was aware of the abjur’s intrusion into something private. Her thumb was now as far away from that ring as possible. “Got something on my face?” She half joked

“Yea, that look you give me.” Reva brushed off the memory. It was something she wanted to imagine, something that she felt she wanted. Perhaps that was Reva’s future she was picturing. It was almost convincing enough, like a hand on the back of your neck or a sword over your head you can almost swear isn’t there. Reva smiled as the boat glided through the water.

Dawn smiled back and looked towards the shore, only moments away. With her ringed hand, she reached into her vest and drew her revolver. Snubnosed, and easily concealable, it was not a model you or I would be familiar with. Completely bespoke, made by the perilous thief herself. It had a silver frame with pearl handles. The cylinder of bullets inside of it, much like the revolvers of the weaponsmiths of Mariposa that had inspired it, dripped with a sort of chill. As if anticipatory, they made no noise. They did not hum like the acausal bullets of other guns. A weapon, silenced. A breath, held.

The boat hit the shorebank, jostling Reva from her seat. She lurched forward and caught herself on the rope handle of the craft. Only one person stood on the shore:  a tall, stout knight with hair interlaced with the flowers of summer. He looked regal, in the same way a blade might. He eyed the party with suspicion. Formen of the Wastes took a step off the boat and, noticing the sentry, raised a long rifle to meet his eyeline. The Wastral looks through the slits of his wide helmet, eyes wide and jittery from the ampule of Auleen’s Blessing he had hidden in his nose. He tells himself it was to calm a shaky hand, and I am sure at some point he had been correct.

Dawn raised her hand and placed it on Formen’s barrel, lowering the rifle to the ground. “Friend, not foe.” She smirked. “At least, as friend as we get.”

The sentry rushed towards the landing party. Mirabell stretched her legs and caught a dirty look from Reva. Mirabell had too long of fingers to be human and that smile she wore looked a bit too wild to be anything but trouble. She looked like a mockery of the human form, flesh stretched out over too much body. She dug her toes into the sand underneath of her and sighed a breath of relief.

“Ah, good to be home.” Mirabell's grin grew wider as she stretched her arms behind her head. Reva hears a sickening crunch as bones settled back into some new, terrible shape. “Been too long, Ashosh Ai.”

The Sentry descended on them,  pulled his plumed helmet from his head, and furrowed his brow. His eyes were like Mirabell’s, constantly sparkling with a light not quite there. “Mrs. Allcott, you’re late. You’re almost three hours late” His voice was somber, as if at a wake. Reva draws her pistol for a reason she can’t quite place. “I’ve put a lot on the line here just-”

“Brightwind, it's me you’re talking about.” Dawn took a step towards the man and placed a reassuring hand, the one with the ring on it, on his shoulder. She smiled wide in a way that always made Reva weak in the knees. “I’d never put you in a position where I’d let you down, right?”

Reva turned towards the castle behind the shore as her employer and their contact began to talk. Herah was standing off to the side, observing the treeline just above the shore.

“You good?” Reva raises an eyebrow, quietly joining him. Herah was a tall, wide man. Short, cropped hair kept tight to his scalp. Burned onto his arm, right where his shoulder meets neck, was a small flower. Segmented in seven different petals. The symbol of Mariposa’s merchant army, employed for any sort of conflict the kingdom would ever need. She never asked how he got the scar on his nose.

“I don’t like how exposed we are right now. We should have landed up the coast a bit.” He motioned towards a small bay further up the shoreline. It sat in the castle’s shadow, the brickwork looming against the sun. Somewhere, above them, they could all hear a song. Mournful, cruel, with notes disharmonic and dissonant. Reva fought the urge to cry, yet a single, lonesome tear rolled down her cheek. “Any Tom, Dick, or Harry could stumble upon us and alert the whole island.”

“It's closer to the castle than we are.” Reva shrugged. “Maybe Dawn knew it’d be more guarded.”

“I like Dawn and all,” Herah glanced down at his companion. “But something tells me she didn’t think through the plan that hard.”

“She hasn’t gotten us killed yet.” 

“That she hasn’t.”

A moment passed. The wind whipped and howled, stirred into frenzy by the storm on the horizon that never seemed to get closer. The singer shifted melodies, the lyrics now about Reva’s childhood, about being lost and scared. This she knew, even if the words were foreign to her. About being stuck in the underbrush, about it getting dark and no one coming to find you.

“Do you think we’re actually after a panpipe?” Reva rubbed her arms, as if to stave off a chill. Herah looked at the woman with confusion. The air was damp and heavy with wet, hotter than the Cambion Coast. “I mean, seems pretty banal.”

“I try not to think about what we’re here to do.” 

Reva raised an eyebrow. Behind them, Dawn laughed loudly, as if hearing the best joke ever told. Nobody buys it. “Is this a special case?

“No, it’s not.” Herah sighed, eyes skirting downwards. “We’re here to take something of value from someone who values it. It makes me sad to think about it for too long.”

Reva smiled and clapped the mountain of a man on his back. “You’re in the wrong profession, friend.”

“Can’t help what I’m good at.” He smiled back at her.

“You can, though.” Reva’s smile dropped, just a bit. It is softer now. Sadder, almost.

“Yeah, but.” Herah looked out towards the sea. There was a storm out there, somewhere. A roiling, boiling thunder that kept the sky alight. He could feel it, he just couldn't see it. He shuddered off the thought, letting it roll from the back of his neck. “This is easier. More right, I guess.”

Reva frowned and looked down. Herah placed a large hand on her shoulder. 

“It doesn’t feel right.” Reva chided, feet kicking an errant shell. 

“Chin up, Rev.” Herah’s thumb rubbed where Reva’s neck meets her shoulders. It is the same motion her mother used to do, years ago. Comforting. It is not something he had ever done before, nor was it anything he’d most likely do again. “Maybe I’ll steal you something shiny, something just for you.”

“It's time.” A gruff voice came from behind them -- Formen. His long rifle was slung over his shoulder. His clothes were long and flowing, like clouds that flew too high. His helmet wasImperial make, Reva noticed the moon with the sword driven through it that he tried to scratch out, but whether he had it  because of his background or because the Western Wastrals trade almost exclusively with the Empire of Night was unknown. The cloth that wrapped around his hands was black and red, fabrics intertwining and woven together to make something that kept out the cold but wicked sweat away. He looked good standing on the sand, steady, as if he was born for it.

“The boss want us?” Herah raised an eyebrow.  Formen nodded. The storm would have to wait. “That’s all I’ll need to hear. Reva, come on.”

Reva nodded in return. The sentry had replaced his helmet at home point, and was now standing next to Mirabell, who’s smile was wide and childlike, right where the sand turns to grass. Dawn was a couple steps behind, gun drawn, wheat blonde hair slick with the salt of sweat and the sea. A small path unfurled in front of them, through the thick brush and unnaturally dense trees. A small, stone arch demarcated the trail. Reva walked, feet already feeling heavy and worn. She fought the urge to catch up with Dawn, to walk in lockstep with her. It made her feel childish whenever she did, as if she was a little lost dog following around its master.

Brightwind put his hand up and the group stopped with him. He looks back and grins. Past the helmet, past the visor and the mystery of whoever this man was, Reva recognized something. Something primal, something pure.

Pride. 

“Stick to the path, friends. To where I step.” He said, tongue uncoiling like a snake between his lips. “There are old things here. The Sundance Throne is an hour walk from here, and the ceremony has already begun.”

“You hear the man, right?” Dawn looked back at her thieves, her perilous cadre. “You wanna live long enough to get paid, you gotta respect this place. It sure as shit don’t respect you.”

The thieves all grunted in approval and, in a moment, were swallowed by the wilds.

If you’ve never been to the Sundance Throne in its prime, I pity you.

Imagine, if you will, a castle nestled deep in some primordial forest. The stones interlaced with flowers and vines, the arches tastefully decayed. Banners that ripple in slight wind, heralding pristine monarchical traditions that predate the very sands of time. On the air, fruit and song and revelry carried like pollen, like breath. It was infectious. It was an Avalon of a better, more right age. An age of gallantry and of knights, in which rule did not need maintaining and all was right and in its own place. 

It was like a place out of Reva’s storybooks, the ones her mother read to her as a child. She would sit on her mother’s lap, light flickering slightly overhead as she read to her. The only scion of a minor corporate noble in Mariposa, Reva would have needed to be well versed in the world, even the parts of it that never have been true. She would ride on her nursemaid’s shoulders like she was a grand steed, strike the head cook in the back of his head with a rolled up piece of paper as he had his smoke.

She placed a hand on one of the stone bricks of a dilapidated archway as they exited the forest. It was like the archway that demarcated her old chateau in the countryside. If she looked hard enough, cared to scour over every inch of the brickwork, she knew she could find her old initials somewhere on here. Faded, time worn, but still there. 

Dawn looked at Reva with pity first, and then slight annoyance. In her hand, just hidden by her sleeve, was her snubnosed revolver. Her thumb was on the hammer of the weapon. She had no illusions of what this place could be. But she was not a cold woman, nor a cruel one.

“It's beautiful.” slipped from Reva’s mouth in a moment of un-vigilance. “How long has this place been here?”

“No idea.” Dawn shrugged, voice modulating in odd ways. “You ask the queen of this place, she’d say forever.”

Formen grunted. “I’d rather not ask her a thing.”

There was a slight pause, pregnant and awkward. Reva coughed. “Right.”

“Always the serious one.” Dawn smirked, hand still pressed tightly to her revolver. “Can’t let the pretty girl have a bit of fun?”

“Fun can be had after the job, miss.”

Their guide had put his helmet back on, but Reva knew the weight of the gaze of the glaring eyes beneath. They were the eyes of the Queen of this place.Judgemental, right, and true: this Reva knew without knowing. He quickly disappeared into the oncoming crowd.

Reva was surprised to see this many bodies here, on an otherwise deserted island. From the beachfront, the castle looked dilapidated. Banners flew and waved, but they were tattered. And the wilds had long overtook this place. Here, now in the shadow of the Sundance Throne itself, this all remained true. But there was a certain air of pageantry to the decay now. The vines that, from the distance of the shore, looked as if haphazard and random now had the arrangement of parade streamers, brightly petaled flowers almost looking like triangular banners. The heavy canopy disguised the equally dilapidated, and yet still inhabited, stone and thatch buildings underneath them. 

And the people --

Maybe hundreds were approaching this grand, stone circular stage. It reminded Reva of the sacrificial circles of the Orcish Hinterlands. Places that the old and ancient Orcs once had inhabited before turning to Isosa worship, now used only during holidays and ceremonies. However, over the years, the sacrifices became more and more symbolic, with men and women throwing pieces of burning memories into the center of the circle.

These, however, looked just as active as ever. In fact, it was the only structure in the square that had no vegetation across it at all. Even the grass that creeped along the party’s feet, the grass that made Reva wish to take her boots off and feel it between her toes, thinned and disappeared as it approached the stone structure, replaced with the sandy shoal that this island was no doubtidly made from. Reva knew, beyond knowing, what rituals were performed here. And for who they were performed on. 

She pretended her shudder was from the sea air.

All manner of folk were here in the Sundance Throne, from all corners of the Askaven Continent. Long fingers, straw hair, big pointed grins. There were Orcs and Humans and Elves and all manner of things which are not those. Long, slender things who look almost like you or I. Things that hide between blades of grass. Things who hide between bolts of lightning.

“Isn’t it wonderful?” Mirabell grinned her toothy grin. Her shoes were still off and the blades of grass wrapped themselves around her toes. She looked back at Reva and grabbed the abjur’s hand. “Not another place on the continent like it.”

Reva clenched her fingers around Mirabell’s. They felt like worms, writhing around beneath her skin. “Maybe not another place like it in existence.”

“Maybe,” Mirabell continued. “Just maybe, I can show you around after the job is done.”

Reva looked around her. Her companions, Dawn, had left. Formen, most likely, absconded to some high tower or parapet to look over the courtyard. Herah and Dawn folded into the crowd, becoming like them. Even now, with how intimately she knew her employer, she would not, could not, be able to identify her. She has become, for this moment and for what felt like forever, a stranger. She steeled herself and, delicately, looked at Mirabell.

“This place is your home?” Reva asked, the question heavy on her tongue. Her throat was dry. Mirabell wrestled down the need to flee, to grab her something to drink. “This queen is your queen.”

“Aye.” Mirabell responded, thumbs rubbing across Reva’s palm. Her brogue is heavy, thicker now than it had been. The crowd of almost people and never-weres envelop them as they walk. Their bodies are warm to the touch, radiating that sickly sweaty heat. Somehow, somewhere, trumpets began to blare. “You’re wondering why I would steal from her.”

Reva nodded.

Mirabell looked over across the courtyard, past the canopy of trees, past the banners and flowers and the birds with human eyes. She saw it, dear reader:The Sundance Throne, the castle of Queen Titania. And, from its tallest spire, a voice echoed across the island. It sang an old song, older than words, but not older than stories. A single, lonely aria of all that you've never wanted to hear.

“Because I love her.”

Reva raised an eyebrow. “An odd reason.”

“This queen, like all queens I suppose, is more than an individual.” Mirabell gripped Reva’s hand that bit tighter. “She is, she can be, everything we can aspire to be. The limit of our bodies is the limit of hers. And when she is resplendent, like the sun, that is wonderful. There would be wind in our sails and beneath our wings.”

“But when she isn’t…”

“Exactly. I love my Queen, but she will kill me.” Mirabell glanced downwards. “She will kill all of us.”

“How?”

“The world has changed, and she has not. Or maybe she has, and I just have not noticed. We are not creatures made for this place.”

Reva smiled, a single tear rolling down her cheek. An effect of the song, an effect mirrored in her companion. “You can be, though. You can break yourself into shape.”

“What do you think I’m trying to accomplish here?” Mirabell laughed slightly to herself. “I wouldn’t have agreed if I did not believe I could.”

Reva nudged her companion with her shoulder. “Are you our secret benefactor?”

“Hah!” She smiled. The wind was cool between the two of them. Mirabell remembered  the first time she had met this ‘secret benefactor’. The smoke filled room, the velvet cushions, the mournful piano that echoed through the manor. A single, plain gold ring on a long finger. Mirabell touched it to her lips and Reva’s mouth tastes like datura and ash. Mirabell let go of her hand. “Maeve I am not.”

“So you’ve met her?”

“Once. She was beautiful. Hair like fire, with these long satin white gloves that extended past her elbow.”

“She sounds resplendent.”

“She is.” Mirabell sighed. “We’ll meet her after this job is complete. In Mariposa.”

Reva smirked. “From one Queen to another, huh?”

“We live in a world of Queens,” Mirabell looked towards the horizon, where the sun meets the storms. “Queen Mariposa, Queen Titania, even Isosa above us. There are the common, and then there is the uncommon. Masters and slaves.”

“What about us? Those would spit in the eyes of the Queens. The servants who swipe the silverware from the table.”

“We hope and we pray that no one knows us enough to categorize us as either or. That is where we die, Reva, when we are known.”

A small, faint crack of lightning echoed across the sea. Reva flinched. Beside her, a man with vines woven between his beard glared at her. His eyes were like diamonds, cold and hard. White, as if he was blind. His hair was thick and braided with moss and lichen. He looked like an old yew tree, standing tall on a hill above large, rolling cliffs. On his hip, a broad sword of white stone. On his back, a titanic bow, hand bent from that ancient tree. There was no string, and no arrows either. On his hands, Reva knew, there was blood. This man glared at her, acknowledging her flinch. Reva knew in his eyes that she was an outsider. That no true son of Ashosh Ai would flinch at the storm.

And that is when the sky, grand as she was, opened her mouth.

“Children of Ashosh Ai! Those who love me and are loved in return!”

The voice of the sky was sharp, cutting through the air like ozone and blood. Reva’s head snapped towards the source of the noise but she couldn’t quite find what caused it. 

“For years, my outrider knights have braved the dark places of this cruel world.”

The man in front of Reva grunted, stepping between Reva and the stage in front of her. He was tall and broad, rolling hair cascading in curls down his shoulders. His bow rested on his neck like the plow of some grand draft animal. In his beard, the flowering vines blossom. He glared down at Reva, moisture clinging to the hair around his mouth. The sun haloed his head and it was as if the fire itself surrounded him.

“You’re not supposed to be here.” His voice was coarse, like loamy sand. Reva, truly, had no idea what he meant by that. “Who do you report to?”

Reva swallowed hard and tasted the bile rising in her throat. “Um.”

The sky continued to speak: “To shine my light deep into the untrue alcoves and hidden enclaves.”

The man took another step toward her. Around his neck, a small knot of wood. Between the ridges and lines of the plant’s matrix, a small light glows. Red, like autumn leaves. “You’re not an outrider. I know all of them. So, you have to be one of their crewmates, right?”

Reva cannot tell if he’s merely goading her or playing some sort of cruel joke. His face, old and scarred, was not jocular. His hands were the perfect size of Reva’s neck. He could, would, crush her in a moment. Not a magick in the world would save her. This she knows.

“To carve truth into a world of lies.”

“I’m with Vanglorious.” Reva stammered the first name she can think of., the knight she entered with. 

The man in front of her smiled. “No you ain’t.” He took another step toward her. “I know his crew. Good neighbors, one and all.”

“To cleave peace from war.”

“New hire.” The words roll from off her tongue, possessed by the spirit of knowledge never known. “After Bittersmith ate it outside the Cambion Coasts.”

“To fulfill our purpose in this cruel place.”

“I could call him up. See who’s bandying around his name.” He gripped Reva’s hand tight. She felt her bones starting to buckle, a small hairline fracture around one of her carpals. Her skin blooms with immediate bruising. 

Reva’s eyes narrowed. “You should do that.” She drew her gun.

“Ser Yew, please forgive me.” Mirabell whispered as she, too, freed her weapon, a small wooden knife from her sleeve. It was sharp as iron and it slipped in between where Ser Yew’s ribs would have been. Mirabell twisted the t-shaped handle as the knight’s hand gripped her back in an approximation of camaraderie. He didn’t cry out, doing so would be an insult to his station. He just gripped Mirabell like she was an old friend and locked eyes with her. She smiled warmly.

The sky cracked with violence. On the curl of its lips, the voice sharpened to a razor’s edge. “We have company.” The crowd turned to face the unwelcome. In their eyes, the flash of lightning. Like the eyes of animals caught in a beam of light. All individuality, all sense, all compassion wiped clean in a moment. Ser Yew drops Reva’s hand. Mirabell twists the knife up, driving it so far deep that her fingers themselves pierce his skin.

Behind her, another set of fingers lace through Reva’s other hand. The skin is calloused and bitter. A mechanic’s hands, a thief's hands --Dawn’s hands. Mirabell locks eyes with Reva. In a moment, all of what might be flashes before her eyes. Smokey rooms and a panpipe in the hands clad in scarlet. A place for peace. She can give Reva nothing but this. 

“Run.”

Mirabell was torn limb from limb. The crowd descended on her like wolves on a lamb. Verdant viscera and bone and sinew and gore splattered on their muzzles. Hands. Claws. A flash of white teeth marred in the violence. Biting and tearing. Reva tried not to see it. Tried to shut her eyes to it as she flees through the flood of the crowd, all clamoring to sink their teeth into Mirabell’s flesh. She tried to block out reality, keen her mind on her footfalls in front of her, to what place might approximate safety here. On the hand in her hand. Tight, desperate, and together.

She failed, every time.

Dawn slammed the door behind them, chest heaving from exertion. Reva threw her hands to her knees. Her chest burned, lungs coiled in knots from the running. Her hands trembled, dousing her pants in Mirabell’s blood. Green blood. Reva always hated being right. The room they found themselves in appeared to be empty, a boon, and limited to only one entry, a bane. It seemed to be a small mess room, with windows looking out towards the courtyard. A tapestry hung on the opposite wall, a burning tree emblazoned in its heart. The courtyard out the window was the same that Reva thought she was in just moments ago. The crowd was restless, even from this distance that much was clear. Queen Titania had disappeared, along with her entourage.

“How, ah.” Reva caught her breath. “How long were we running for?”

“Not sure.” Dawn lied. Forty-three minutes almost exactly. “Fey magic, makes time pass funny.”

“So they are fey.” Reva shot Dawn a look. From outside the door, she could hear running, faint shouting. They were looking for her. Looking for them. They will do to Reva what they did to Mirabell. Rip her flesh from her bones, floss their teeth with her hair. She will be made nothing. Rewa locked her eyes with Dawn’s, her glare knife sharp.  This woman is her killer. Reva shoved her harder than she intended to. “You should have told us this, Dawn.”

Dawn glared back at her. They should have made it to the center of the castle by now, they’re just wasting time now. “Yea well, would you have gone otherwise? Gotta be worth all the coin I was gunna give you.”

“No.” Reva sighed and followed Dawn’s eyeline. “Babe, you can’t just lie to me like that.”

Dawn crossed the room and looked back at Reva over her shoulder. “I can, though. At the end of the day, you came with. I didn’t hold a gun to your head.” Dawn motioned over to the crowd. “You wanna see if they’re any nicer than me?”

Reva broke their gaze. “I don’t, no.,” her mouth thinned into a hard line. “But we’re only making it through this if we’re a team, Dawn.”

“Yeah.”

“And I deserve some answers.” Reva crossed the room to be next to her employer. Not her lover, not her friend. At least, not at this current moment. “Who hired us?”

“A noble out of Mariposa.” Dawn shrugged. “I don’t know any more than that.”

More shouting from outside the door. A bit closer now. Reva’s hands began to shake. “What are we stealing?”

“A panpipe.” Dawn replied. Her eyes were focused on the door. “I didn’t lie ‘bout that.”

“Do you know why it's special enough to get Mirabell killed?”

Dawn blinked. “No.” She lied. 

Reva sighed. “You’re in the dark as much as we were then, fuckin figures.”

Dawn raised a hand to the nearby hanging tapestry. Her fingers traced along the flames of the burning Castle Elphame like they had along the bumps of Reva’s spine. Her face was inscrutable, but her touch was gentle, as if the threads were woven braille, a message only her hands can parse. Reva’s eyes softened at the sight, her shoulders untensing. This was a side of Dawn that Reva knew. Dawn’s fingers reach Durandal. Here, he was depicted in a small, almost childlike manner. In his hands, he was holding a silver blade, like a shard of moonlight. His fingers bleed, as do his eyes. Next to him, his adversary: The Wolf. Her head is shaved, her eyes covered in soot. She is smiling with thousands of teeth. Behind them both, the Wyld burns. The death of all fey. This was a tapestry depicting the Fall of Elphame, the time when the fey lost their immortality. A child’s story. 

“This must be The Blade Awoke.” Reva remarked, off-handedly. “Titania’s daughter who became her son.”

“Durandal.” Dawn said. “You’ve heard the stories then?”

“Don’t quite think they’re just stories anymore.” Reva cast another quick glance at the window. “A fey believed so strongly in a cause, that he broke his name to serve his mother. He became a weapon to stop The Wolf.”

Dawn chuckled. “Didn’t work, did it?”

“No, but,” Reva smiled “I think it's a sweet story. To believe, so strongly, that you might change who you are.”

“You see love here?”

Reva reached over to put a hand on Dawn’s shoulder. “Who wouldn’t?”

Dawn  couldn’t decide if she wanted to smile or frown. She produced a knife from her scarf and tore it into the fabric. Her knife cut through the strands of history, excising Durandal from the story. 

“What are you doing?” Reva says in a half-laugh, as if forgetting where they are.

“I dunno,” Dawn lied. She kept cutting, tearing fabric away until just the Wolf remained. She now burns alone, fighting an enemy long defeated. Blades raised with nothing there to cut or rend. “I wanted to do it, so I did. Keep a little souvenir here. Of love.”

Reva frowned. Is she making fun of her? Dawn was a lot of things, but cruel she was not. At least, Reva wanted to believe that. She tried to reach across to Dawn, to see what she might be thinking. What she might be feeling. She attempted to force a jamais vu, mind keening on a singular want and desire. To know Dawn better, to attempt to bend this woman she loves into a shape Reva can understand. There is nothing for her efforts. All she sees is Dawn and the mystery woman on that sunny spring day in the Mariposa market. The same vision she saw on the boat. Dawn narrowed her eyes. Her thumb rubbed along her ring in her closed fist. She could feel the intrusion on the back of her neck, like a shiver before a rumbling storm across a city. So her mind shifted, directing the attention to what she wanted to be seen feeling.

“You’re a weapon, aren’t you.” Reva chided. She was being metaphorical, her disappointment in Dawn’s intrusion dripping from her words.  “I attempt to bridge the gap, you cut me away. You were made to hurt.”

“No, I’m not.” Dawn placed her hand along the fraying fabric of the tapestry. Durandal used to be there. And now, he is not. She holds him in her hand. “It was something I chose to be.”

“You can choose to not be it, too.” Reva considered the gap between them once more, but thought better of trying to bridge it once more. “If you wanted to.”

“We have a job to do, Reva.” Dawn looked back at her and smiled in the same way she once did to her wife. The same way she had in the memory Reva had plucked. “We can talk about what I want to be once we’ve survived and we’re rich.”

“Ah,” Reva refocused, remembering with sudden clarity exactly where she was.  The voices are distant again. They do not know where they are -- yet. “Yeah.”

“Come on.” Dawn sighed going for the door. Towards the unsafety of the castle. “Maybe we can meet up with the others.

Reva always follows her.

In front of them, Herah’s blood pooled as he slumped against the credenza. Muddy red and brown fading into the threaded gold of the carpet. He was frowning, his face permanently held in slight puzzlement. Reva had never seen him frown before, or if she had all thought of it was obliterated from her mind by what was before her. In his hand, a small gold idol. Many hands and all sharp angles. Something shiny, just for her. Reva brought a hand to her own mouth, blocking a silent scream.

Above him, Vainglorious Brightwind, Third Outrider Knight of Queen Titania the Eternal. His armor shone with all the fierceness of the Sun, like he was something out of a storybook. It caught light that wasn’t there, refracting the gilded bricks and fabrics of the Sundance Throne. He lifted his alabaster cape towards his blade and cleaned Herah’s blood from it. His helmet, which had bornDurandal’s likeness on the front, was discarded at his feet, the solemn visage shattered by Herah’s errant gunshot.

“Brightwind…” Dawn sighed. In her hand is her silvered revolver. A frail thing. Her fingers gripped tight around the pearl handles. Knuckles white.

“Don’t you ‘Brightwind’ me, Allcott.” 

“You’ve killed my employee.” Dawn motioned towards Herah’s chilling corpse. Reva raised an eyebrow in disgust at Dawn. An employee? The tattoos on Reva’s hands began to glow white hot. 

Brightwind laughed, hollow and shrill, like he was trying to hide it from some prying ears. “My Queen ordered this man dead personally.” His gloved hand struck his chestplate. Right over his heart. Maybe he saw Dawn looking there. Maybe he saw the errant twitch in her fingers. Maybe, just maybe, he felt it on the wind. But here, even beneath that armor, his heart was exposed. Imperiled. “You know what she would do to me if I were to disobey.”

Dawn centered her pistol, leveled at his chest.  Brightwind’s hands trembled.“Yeah, what I’d do to you would be a blessing, right?

“Don’t be like that, Allcott.” Brightwind took a step forward. The hammer on Dawn’s revolver clicked.

“Like what?”

“Unreasonable.” Another step. Herah’s body was reflected in his shining armor. Titania gave that armor to him, years ago, for leading her people from the Wyld to wherever new hell this place was. Vainglorious kept it polished to a mirrored sheen. Even if the light got too bright, even if the sun reflected off it in his eyes. He would never stand to have it sullied. “She was behind me. What else was I supposed to do?”

“You respect your queen enough to kill for her,” fell out of Reva’s mouth,  “But not enough to keep us from stealing from her.”

“Leash your pup, Allcott.”

Reva’s vision flashed red. “What the fuc-”

“You don’t get to call her that.” Dawn cut her abjur off. “You’re no better. Reva’s right, you jumped at the chance to betray her, you know, as long as your ass wasn’t on the line.”

Reva met  Dawn’s eyeline, twisting her foot into the carpet, like a viper coiled to strike. It was in the way the light moved around Dawn. It was not passing through her, it was not blocked by her. In this moment, Dawn cast no shadow. She was not radiant. She was not a queen. She would not need servants to kill. This Reva knew.

“I don’t know what-” Brightwind began.

“What I mean?” The side of Dawn’s face is obscured by her revolver. “I mean that you’re a coward. And I don’t do business with cowards.”

And Reva knew --. 

She ground her foot against the fine carpet below her, the one sodden and heavy with her friend’s blood. Her tattoos were white hot, glowing like molten metal through the veins of a crucible, and her fists ossified into steel. The muscles of her leg contract and tear, hardening as well. Her veins contracted, slowing her blood flow to a crawl under the pure pressure of transformation. Brightwind was maybe thirty feet in front of her. He kept  his eyes on her mate, on the woman holding his death in front of him. She was gleaming, this Reva knows. She was what Reva will disappear into.

She crossed the distance before Dawn could pull the trigger. The thief blinked and, in a moment, Reva was not beside her. Dawn was surprised when she saw her employee in front of her, blocking her shot. No longer is his heart exposed, no longer is his death clean and known. Reva ruined this. Dawn fought the urge to shoot anyway, swallowing down that disgust somewhere deep. Reva’s fist made contact with Vainglorious Brightwind’s chestplate. Though it may be infused with ancient and gleaming magics, bronze will forever remain no match for steel. The breastplate dented like the hull of a sinking ship. A small, sharp gasp shudders past his lips. His feet slipped from underneath him. His blade fell from his grasp. It hit the floor with a clatter that echoed through the halls of the Sundance Throne, heard by all except Dawn, Reva, and Vainglorious Brightwind.

Behind them, Dawn lowered her pistol slightly. Not enough to not be ready if she was needed, but enough to hesitate if she ever was. Enough to miss any shot she might have taken. Reva, on the other hand, remained a blur of violence. She reared her fist back again, skin broken and bloodied from the contact with the metal plate. Clang. She struck him again, another dent in Vainglorious’ armor. Blood flew this time, immolate as it soars through the air. Brightwind stumbled another step back, feet pulling the carpet runner up like waves on the shoreline. His chest was heavy and bruised, blood pooling around a broken rib. His body was not mortal, it was not physical. This is what Titania had promised him, that this armor and this purpose would make him perfect. 

And yet, why does it ache? 

He could not take another blow. Her fist glowed like fire, her eyes ablaze with rage. He twisted, pulling his broken torso back as he stumbled away at the last moment, and her fist sails past him, carrying her in cruel momentum. She tumbled forward, curling her body so her eyes were still locked on the knight’s in front of her.

“Shit.”

Behind the two of them, Dawn cursed. The ravenous crowd had found its way into the castle. Two of them, mouths and hands stained with Mirabell’s gore, began to lumber towards the three of them, their eyes glowing like an animal caught in firelight, senseless and lost. In their hands, cruel and jagged blades. Even I could not be sure they could tell friend from foe. She glared at Reva and Vainglorious, locked in mortal peril. Reva dropped her weight, arms braced at either side of her. Reva’s fist, iron and stalwart, dripped crimson. It, for a moment, made Dawn’s breath hitch in excitement. It was something so human, to her at least. To raise arms to defend what you love, enough to break yourself for it. Dawn fought a smile as she leveled her revolver against the interference. This was not her fight, but it was one she could ensure they had alone.

Dawn broke into a sprint, blowing past Reva and her knight-errant. Reva bore her fist again in front of her. “Come on, Brightwind. You’re mine.” The words dripped from Reva’s mouth like rabid spit. They froth as they escape from her lips. She lunged forward, hand grasping for Brightwind’s neck. There is exposed flesh there. Something weak, something to break. She would grab him there, crack him open like a crab. Reva, beyond anything, knew that the coward was squishy down to the core. 

Three gunshots rang out. Dawn knelt, elbows braced on her thigh. A soldier’s stance to eliminate sway. Pure instinct, beaten into the circuits and servos of Dawn’s very logic. It felt right to hurt, to kill. Two landed dead center onto one of the revelers, the one with straw hair and a sea breeze scent. He dropped to the floor, dead before his mind could comprehend what had happened to him. His companion, a skinny little redhead redcap, brandished bloodied blade and was missed by inches. The redcap let loose a scream and looked down at his erstwhile and new friend, seeing the wounds burn and sizzle from the projectiles. He was made for this moment. To hurt his Queen’s foes.

Brightwind raised his arm to block Reva. Her fist made contact with his vambrace at the moment that Dawn fired another shot and the metal crumpled instantly. Reva’s fist continued it's trajectory, pinning Brightwind’s now useless arm against his sternum. The two of them fell to the floor, legs locked between each other. Their breath was heavy, labored. Reva straddled the knight, teeth bared and hand holding his own arm to his throat. Not enough to choke him, but enough to make his breath shallow and pained. Dawn turned around to see another three knights emerge from where they came from. A large man carried a censer like a flail. He had to lean down to make it through the doorway, barely squeezing through. Behind him, two thin, armored forms with spears that stab and bite. 

Dawn cycled her revolver, acausal bullets off gassing their alchemical memories. She still had three shots worth of energy left in the chamber, but the man before her lumbers and takes up the whole hallway. Her thumb ran the rounded edge of the cylinder as she assessed the brute. He wants to luxuriate this, to crush them at his own leisure. To enjoy every feeling of bone snapping against metal. She has the time to reload. Brightwind locked his legs behind Reva’s back and flipped the two of them over towards Dawn. His arm was shattered and useless -- He would not last in a straight up fight. Reva’s hand still clung onto his neck guard. She pulled him in close and ripped the bronze from off his body, rivets and leather tearing uselessly. Her fist lost  its hue, hand purple and bloody. Her teeth began to glow white with fire. 

His neck exposed. 

Her teeth finds purchase  in its side. 

The large man was above them now. Reva could not see him, eyes shut in rapturous enjoyment. Vainglorious’ blood tasted like clipped grass and white wine, earthy and intentional. She hated how much she enjoyed it. Brightwind let out a garbled scream like an Ortolan drowning in armagnac. Dawn’s pistol leveled at the brute above her lover. The hammer clicked-- a single shot. The man fell to the floor, blood pooling between his eyes. His companions dropped behind him. He is meat now, to be used as a shield. Dawn continued to fire. Flesh tore away from his corpse in chunks. Red and brutal, they flew through the air. The backblast coated Dawn’s face in soot and sulfur. Sparks from metal striking the acuasal bullet screamed in immolate joy, striking her cheek. She did not feel it. 

She would not let them take Reva. Not while Brightwind still lived.

Reva pulled away, ripping sullen flesh away from Brightwind’s neck. Green arterial blood shot across glittering golden bricks.The viscera caught in the light, and the hall was filled with a momentary sanguine constellation. Vainglorious Brightwind looked up at Reva Ambrose, only daughter of Misha Ambrose, and watched her swallow. His own green blood stained rivulets down her mouth and the front of her shirt. He brought his hand to his throat to staunch the blood, but there was just too much of him gone, too much missing to keep himself together. He, in that moment, became the first to recognize her for what she really was, that borrowed hunger in her eyes. 

And then, at last, he was gone.

The knife in his hands fell to the floor, discarded, useless. In another world, Reva would have hesitated just a moment longer, and his knife would have found purchase in her heart. The two of them would have been intertwined there, raw and bloodied on the floor. Viscera and lifestuff mixed together on millenia old tile and stone. 

This, dear reader, this Reva knew.

And then, she heard it: Dawn firing off another salvo from her service weapon. She was standing over the hulking beast of a corpse not six feet from Reva. Her nonfiring hand dug  into the neck of something tall and thin and hateful. His companion lay crumpled,  riddled with holes. The side of her dominant arm was covered with soot and burns, backblast of repeated shots from her revolver. Her quarry looked up at her like Reva had done numerous times. Reva sees, in that moment, herself in the kneeling man’s position. In wood lined rooms on the road, on silken sheets, in dark pulsing drumbeat backrooms of bars and clubs. Pleading, doe eyes wet with tears and exertion. Dawn raised her thumb to cup the man’s face. It is gentle, almost. Tender. And then Reva sees the bruising around his neck from where Dawn’s boney fingers crushed his windpipe. She places the barrel of her revolver against his forehead like a kiss. He lets out a scream as the hot metal burns his flesh. Dawn narrows her eyes. 

She pulled the trigger.

And the man fell to the floor, spent.

There was a moment where the gunshot echoed throughout the hallway. Another, where only their two ragged breaths can be heard. Reva stared at Dawn. Her gaze stays low for a long time, locked on the man beneath her, before she turns her head towards Reva.  She half expected her lover to be dead. She saw it, in her mind's eye, that vision of another world like a shiver on the back of her neck. Jamais Vu. The two of them, intertwined in violence on the cold stone of the Sundance Throne. Reva was not dead, though. Her hand was bloodied and bruised. Her mouth dripped with blood not hers. In her eyes, something wild and wolven. But, she was not dead.

The two stared at each other a moment more. Wind whipped outside as a storm began to batter the island of Ashosh Ai. Dawn’s revolver hung by her side, still gripped in Dawn’s white knuckles, her face inscrutable. Blank, like the woman that Reva had known for six years was not there. As if replaced with a simulacrum that Reva might never have known. Another insidious thought crept her way into Reva’s mind. Was that really Dawn? Not the Dawn in front of her now, but the Dawn that she had known. Was she the illusion?  Doubt crept, as the cold light of violence obliterated those falsehoods, , replaced Reva’s lover with an automaton of cruelty.

“That’s my Reva.” Dawn said in a voice mechanical and unlike hers. There was no odd modulation, it’s too light and too smooth to be Dawn’s voice. She smiled, but only with her mouth. Small flecks of blood covered her face, but Dawn bore no wounds. It was as if the thing in front of her is a hallucination, unscathed by violent reality. She took a step forward and if Reva had the energy to move back she would have. She climbed down from that massive corpse in front of her and placed a hand on Reva’s neck. Her fingers were cold, and Reva knows this was how they had always felt. She rubbed her thumb along Reva’s lower lip.

And Reva Ambrose began to cry.

“How long are you going to give me the silent treatment?”

This was the first thing that Dawn said to Reva in hours. They had reached the entrance of Titania’s throne room some 30 minutes ago. It was a set of gold doors with no handles and no locks. The tops of them disappeared into the darkness, leaving Reva with a sense of unease. By her internal map, the one that she knew not where it came from, they had reached the top of the Sundance Throne. There was no more ‘up’ to go. And yet, these doors crawled onwards. Anything could be up there. There could be infinite layers to the world, yet uncovered, yet unexplored. This was not how her storybooks ended. In them, there would be a queen beyond these doors. A queen to depose, to unthrone, to usurp. The cruel and wicked tyrant dashed upon the blades of the right and true. 

Reva and Dawn were not right, and they were not true. They were thieves in the night. They were never to be known, this was never to be an event that would have been written about. A thing was to disappear and those who steward it would be none the wiser. 

Nobody was supposed to die.

But now, this was an event. This moment, where Dawn was fiddling with the lock on a door that had no lock, was to be recorded by someone. It would be pondered and examined and studied. There would be a motive that would be ascribed to the dead and cause ascribed to the actions that followed it. She knew, beyond anything else, that these actions, this perilous theft, would change history in some way. That if the world was to reset, if the Celestial Civil War was to happen again and again, this moment would somehow become fixed in reality itself. That Mirabelle and Herah and Brightwind would always die on this cold, shale island in the middle of nowhere. Try as she might, she may never have been able to save them.

She looked down at Dawn. The lock in front of her is not real, but a simulacrum, manifested.. She had seen Dawn do something like this before, a way to interface with the underlying magick of whatever bound the doors shut. Turing abstract fundaments to reality, making the complex magickal code underneath them simple. Dawn had said before that it requires an intense concentration, that Reva was never to speak as she was performing this lockbreaking. Either Dawn was worried about Reva’s feelings so much to usurp such concern or she never needed the concentration to begin with. 

“I’m not.”

“You’re lying to me.” Dawn chided. “Come on, babe. I think we’re beyond that.”

Reva chuffed and clenched her fist absentmindedly. Her two fingers are broken, the rest of her hand is bloodied and bruised. But she survived, and Brightwind did not. “How do you mean?”

“I’ve seen you.” Dawn looked back at her without turning her head. Purple iris shining through past bottle blonde hair. “The real you that I think you’ve kept locked up.”

Reva narrowed her eyes. “How do you mean.” She repeated herself, firmer.

“You’ve never turned your teeth to violence like that. Usually, you keep those for me.” Dawn chuckled, turning her eyes back to her task. “You were radiant.”

“I don’t feel radiant.” Reva looked down at her feet. Her boots were covered in green blood, as was the front of her pants. She felt heavy, wet, soaked and sodden with blood. “I’ve never done that before.”

“You haven’t?”

“No.” She paused. “I saw something. In here.” She tapped absently against her temple with her broken hand.. She winces in pain when the ruined bones make contact.

“What’d you see?”

“I saw Brightwind, um, Vainglorious. I saw him bleeding you dry. I saw him killing me, and then you. And, in that moment, I knew what I needed to become.”

“A set of teeth?”

“Yeah, I guess.” Reva crossed her arms and looked at the door they came from. There were no footsteps, no one would dare to venture this close. The castle’s defenders had to have known where they were, how close they were to their prize. There was no escape, no way out. And yet Dawn continues to press forward.

“Durandal.” Dawn looked back again. Her voice was cold. Mechanical, like the projected lock in front of her. “He did something similar.”

“That’s the story.”

“It's truth. He carved himself into a blade, for the love of his mother.” Dawn looked down at the door again, at her own reflection in the glittering gold. “He changed who he was, fundamentally. Shifted from female to male, broke his name in half.”

“His name?”

“The names of Fae, their true names -- they’re powerful.” Dawn recounted. “If we steal one of them, we could make any fae do anything. Even Titania. We can compel them to unmake themselves.”

“Is that what we’re stealing here, Dawn?” Reva stepped forward, in her eyes she could see that power. Rending the very being asunder, unmaking who they are at their conceptual level. It is what Dawn is attempting to do to this lock, what Reva did when she tore Vainglorious’ throat in half. What happened to Mirabell. “Are we stealing Titania’s true name?”

“I’m a thief, not a revolutionary.” Dawn chuckled. “I’m not in the queen toppling business anymore.”

“Then what are we doing here?” Reva took one more step forward. Her fists are clenched.

Dawn turned around now, facing Reva. She was on her knees, looking up at her former lover. Dawn knew this now. No matter what happened, no matter who survived. The two of them are never to touch each other in love, ever again. “Are you threatening me, Reva? You going to bare your teeth like you did to Brightwind?”

There was a pause. A beat. The air in the room went cold. Reva felt the pieces of Vainglorious fallow in her stomach, the salty brine of his blood in the back of her throat. She felt her teeth grow long and grow sharp, glow white hot with the Wolf’s Rage. And she knows, now, what she is channeling. Wolf magic. Chaos and entropy upon her lips. She took a moment, and breathed. She forces a Jamais Vu, not with Dawn this time, but inwards. Hunting for the capability, to see if there was any part of her who could turn those fangs upon Dawn, the woman she loves. 

She never finds it.

“No.”

“Then stop wasting my time.” Dawn turned back around, a look of disappointment on her face. “And fucking let me work, Reva.”

There was another moment of pure silence.

“Who is she?” Reva asks. She regretted it the moment it slips her lips, as if that question, so implied by every interaction, was never to be asked.

Dawn did not turn back around. “Who is who?”

“When I turn to you and focus, and you rub that ring and shut me out, I see a woman. Black hair, messy bun. Spring’s day in Mariposa.”

“Oh,” Dawn said plainly. “Her.”

“You owe me that. Who is she?”

Dawn looked more intently into the lock in front of her. The ring hummed a tone that sounded like spring on the wind. Reva did not need to force a connection to know what she was thinking of. Reva can see Dawn’s reflection in front of her. Before, all she could see was her own reflection. Dawn’s had been absent. Now, the two of them are visible. “Yeah, ok. I can give you that.”

Reva crossed her arms. “Who. Is. She.” She asked now, for a third time. The irony was not lost on Dawn. The compulsion of threes. 

“That woman is my wife, ah, ex-wife.”

Reva sighed, letting her breath slip from between her lips. That’s what she had feared. She walked to the window and looked over the island. The crowd was ravenous. They churned like the waves on the sea below them. Torches and swords are held aloft, making them look like glittering stars in the void. The moon looked at them from above, hanging hungry over this tableau. It was not night, not moments ago, but the Lady of Hounds will not be denied. 

“You don’t sound too sure. You’re still wearing her ring, after all.”

“We never got divorced.” Dawn paused her ministrations with the lock. “I think she thinks I’m dead. Or wishes I am.”

“I could have forgiven that, Dawn.” Reva looked over at her shoulder. “I always kinda figured I wasn’t your main girl.”

“How’s that?”

“When you kiss me.” Reva breathed. “I can always tell you’re trying to kiss someone else.”

Dawn looked up at Reva, dropping the lock entirely. “And you’d be ok with that?”

“I liked you, Dawn.” Reva looked back at her. In her mind, she pictures this a romance storybook. Where the grand gesture of love might save the day. “You’re brilliant and radiant. I didn’t care in what way, I knew I needed to have you.”

The corner of Dawn’s mouth twitched. She isn’t sure if it was a smile or a frown. “You’re nothing like her, you know.”

“Then, what was she like?” Reva glared at Dawn out of the corner of her eyes.

“You don’t wa-”

“You don’t get to tell me what I do or don’t want.” Reva interrupted. “What was she like, godsdamnit?”

Dawn flinched, just for a moment. “I knew she was the brilliant one. Smart as a whip, with eyes that glittered like diamonds. She was ambitious to a fault. That, if the need arose, she'd hurt me if she had to, and I wouldn't be able to fault her. That woman reminded me of someone I knew once.” The words escaped out of her, as if compelled. “She saw through me immediately. Saw through the illusion and the half truths, knew me in a way I hadn’t been known for years. I became her assistant, and we made great things. Beautiful bits of knowledge that have never nor will ever be replicated.”

“So what happened?”

“Later happened. I knew I was falling in love. And I knew that if I loved her, I couldn't, wouldn't, be the thing I promised to be. I'd like to think she wouldn't fault me, but I dunno.”

“You’re right.” Reva looked back at Dawn. She did not think Dawn would look up from her task for this conversation. She knew, beyond knowing, that she did not have that respect for Reva. To be wrong angered her. “I sound nothing like her. Why were you even with me?”

Because Reva was a self pitying pissant. Because Reva was a silly girl who still believes in things like love. Because she was everything like Dawn and nothing like Blair, like Her.

“Because I hate you, and you love me.” Dawn’s voice was cold, but it was not distant. It was not mechanical. It was, for good and for ill, unmistakably Dawn, hard, and hoarse and real.. “We need each other. And that type of thing neither of us could ever give up.”

The lock clicked. It fell to the ground and then disappeared into star stuff. Dawn, still looking at Reva, stands up, shakes her shoulders, and then looks towards the door. It appeared as if nothing had been done to it, but as  Dawn raised her finger to it and pushed, it gave way, opening as if some grand giant had compelled it to do so. She disappeared within. 

Reva did not move, not for what seems like ages. There was a part of her that wanted to peer into that vault. To see what gilded treasures Titania had hoarded away for centuries. Gold stacked to the ceilings, swords and weapons with names of yore, maps to hidden islands where adventure might yet be found. It was, I am sure, magical to imagine what is in there. And so, unburdened by truth, she continued to stand. 

Dawn and I, however, are not so liberated.

The room itself was barren. The coffers of the island had long run dry. Everything on this island served not out of coin, but out of devotion to their lady. Not even cobwebs remained, the spiders that lurked here having long died of eternal starvation. There had been no living being that had stood inside the vault in years. And, at the center of a worn piece of marble fashioned into a pillar, was a small panpipe, standing upright and  leaning on nothing. It was wooden, strapped together with vines that smelled like apricot wine. It played the tune of a better story.  A kinder one. Dawn raised a hand to it and cradled it gently. It was warm and it felt like love. With her other, she pulls out a small tapestry piece.

Durandal.

It was soaked through with blood and crumpled, but Titania’s son no less. She places the pan pipes within her scarf. And she pauses. A thought crosses her mind. She hefts Durandal in her hand like the cloth weighed more than gold. On his face, now smattered with red and green blood, was woven a brutal scream. A challenge, for a wolf at his door. She smiles warmly, and places him on the pillar. 

Reva saw Dawn exit the vault and sighed, eyes closed in contemplation. She opened them and sees Reva, a look passing between them. Dawn’s cheeks were stained with tears but she was smiling, clasping the pan pipe to her chest in both hands. Reva was smiling as well, for no reason in particular. She doesn’t know why she smiles. Dawn looks down at her ring on her finger. That solid gold band that kept Reva from Dawn, the real Dawn. The thing that obscured so much. She moves to take it off.

And then it happened.

Reva did not need to force it this time, and the weight of absolute reality hits her. There is a library, far beyond the horizon, with books that stretch until forever with every kind of knowledge you’ve never wanted to see. At the center of that place, a star, unburdened by time. And at its entrance, a woman with blonde hair stands. Her nose is not crooked and her hair is not curly and her eyes are not purple but it is Dawn. Her natural curls straightened to a painful degree and with her hands nailed behind her back. Her clothes match her eyes, a deep and true azure. Like waves one would get lost in.

A woman with floor length black hair stands in front of her, leaning on the counter and she is smiling like Dawn was smiling at Reva. It is a smile wide enough to get lost in. And in every moment, Reva knew this was what Dawn was protecting, this memory of this woman. What she had kept Reva from at every turn, distracting her with sentimentality and affection. Whenever Reva had leaned in for a kiss, this is who was kissing Dawn back. She leans over the counter, grabs Dawn by her lapel, and plants a single, toothy kiss on her cheek like a maiden sending her knight to war. When she pulls away, there is a mark that will never be washed off.

Reva had seen what she thought Dawn was, in that hallway with Vainglorious. That violent thing, carved from many shaped cruelties and inflicted upon reality. Whether or not that was Dawn at all was irrelevant. Reva knew this to be her lover, now. No longer was she this brilliant woman. No longer was the edge of Dawn’s body the edge of Reva’s mind. And yet, she was standing before her, the grand illusion of Dawn becoming ever so close to shattering. In this light, her skin looked real, with veins and blood and secrets buried just beneath the surface. If Reva tried, if she looked deep within her mind's eye, she could see Dawn’s heart in this very moment, reflected in that black haired woman’s eyes.

This radiant truth scared her.

It scared her because no longer could Dawn be a construct, no longer could she contain Dawn within herself. She would not be the blade in the night or the perilous thief or her lover or any other sort of childish and selfish thing that Reva might need. As the toothy mark on Dawn’s cheek grows ever wider, as the gaps between the then and the now come to a screaming collision, Reva turns away. The room grows cold. Dawn’s ring stops just before her knuckle. Her tears dry up. Behind her, there is the past. The comfortable reality Reva thinks is the truth. Where Dawn would brandish blade and they might be in love. She sees it now. In the market places of Mariposa, in the face of a woman that would never look like her. This would be her future. She could carve away everything from the tapestry of life to make it so. She would become the knife and cut away the present and past to make way for this future.

“In this, I find you.”

Reva never sees it coming.

So lost in this reality was she did not hear the voice of the Queen of All Fey. She did not feel the creeping hands behind her, twelve of them, ghosting her legs, up her body, and wrapping themselves around her very neck. The fingers were as sharp as lightning and gentle as every lover Reva had ever felt. This is what Titania lived in, what drew her to Reva Ambrose. The overwhelming, intoxicating and unbearable reality of the past. Reva did not hear her own bones snapping, or feel the blood pooling in her lungs as the fingers crawled down her open, gormless mouth. All she could hear is a child that is not her’s asking for another apple. She does not feel them tearing and ripping and biting and laughing and rending. All she can feel is a wife that is not her’s talking about the weather. And, in a moment that felt like forever, Reva’s strings snapped, and her body falls limp.  And in her glassy, bloodshot eyes, Dawn could see what she is seeing. She could see her own ex-wife infecting Reva’s final thoughts. Dawn didn’t even see herself.

All Dawn could ever have done is run.

Dawn emerged onto the beach just as the storm began to batter the island.

In front of her, Formen of the Wastes. He stood against the boat, rifle resting on the ground next to him. The waves were choppy, but there was no sea that would keep Dawn on this island. She was dripping with blood, and her revolver was running hot. She ran so fast, and so far - thirty nine minutes, fifteen seconds.

“Boss.” He nodded.

“You’re still alive.” Dawn sighed, relieved. From the sky, the queen of this place begins to scream. The clouds roil, the monstrous seas churn. “How?”

He shrugged, his rifle scraping slightly against the boat as it floats against the shore. “I didn’t let anyone get anywhere near me.” He looked up to the castle. It looked so still down here. He couldn’t hear the roiling crowds. “I saw Mirabelle eat it, but I lost track of everyone else.”

“Gone.” Dawn looked back at the castle. “We need to leave now.”

“Shame,” was all Formen could muster. Dawn glared at him out of pure instinct. There was a part of her that understands his blaise attitude, a part of her she wants to think is true. “Hopefully they took some down with them.”

Dawn approached the boat. “They did, they were absolutely beautiful” She looked down at Formen’s rifle and met the eyes of her reflection in its barrel. “At least they died for something.”

“Not like us, huh?” Formen shrugged, picking up his gun and loading himself onto the boat. “Getting rich for nothing?

Dawn followed him onto the boat as well, and would not say a word until the island disappeared into the distance.

[cupoftrembling]

Field Notes: Bone Boys

Petrier didn’t know when his father had become an old man.

Maybe it was when his wife died in the summer of 73’ Licentious. Maybe it was when he had that nasty fall last year. Maybe it was when he started calling Petrier by his brother’s name. Maybe it was when the city he served as a butcher for sixty years had fallen to the Empire. Maybe it was none of those things.

Or maybe, and just maybe dear reader, it was when he saw his father collapsed on the butcher’s floor. His skin was loose around his eyes, sunken and red. His fingers looked like bones, gripped tight in rigor mortis around a bloodied cleaver. His muscles hung from him like loose robes, pulling taught a sun kissed skin that had been loved and abused for years too many. 

The butcher’s floor looked like a mortuary room, and the smell of the beast Petrier’s father had been smoking for the last two hours tasted like ash in the back of Petrier’s throat. Petrier looked in his father’s now lifeless eyes. He was never a cruel man, but he was not jovial either. He had cruel eyes, though. Sharp, pernicious things. Even if he had never muttered a single word against Petrier, he could always tell what his father’s judgment was with a single, demolishing glance. 

Petrier had imagined that, when this inevitability came, he would be more devastated. He would rend his clothing like Isosa had done for her daughters. But time, that Wolf’s curse, creeps in to all things. Perverts them, spoils them. And the years he saw his father limp around on one foot had curdled any such sentimentality. The man looked barely alive. His death did not change that. His skin had no glow, no warmth or roseiness. 

Neither did the man who was standing over him. His skin had the same grave pallor as Petrier’s father did. Same tautness, as if too little fabric spread over too much. Same bonechilling smile, same judgemental eyes. It was as if this stranger had stolen all of that from his father. Plucked it like a liver from Prometheus’s chest. This man was a scavenger in a long, black coat. Across his cheek, a single bloodless slash. Fresh, like an amateur surgeon cutting haphazardly into a corpse. His arms were crossed behind his back and a wide brimmed hat blocked out the sterile light hanging above him.

“Petrier, I presume?” He spoke in a friendly tone. Petrier reaches for his own cleaver. He had spent some hours in the butcher’s shop helping his ailing father. He was not as skillful with the blade as his father was. “I was an associate of your fathers, I’m so sorry about his passing.”

“No you aren’t.” Petrier responds, cleaver now fully in hand. . He had spend enough time around Le Marc street to know who this was. What shifty figures lurked in back alleys. “You’re a Bone Boy, a Garcons de Os.”

“That I am.” The man smiled back. “But that still makes me an associate of your father’s.”

“He would never associate with crooks like you.” Petrier gripped his cleaver a bit tighter, voice dripping with uncertainty. “So, you kill the man.”

“Do you see a cut on his flesh?” The man motioned towards his father’s pristine, lifeless body. Petrier furrowed his brow. His father looked peaceful. As if it had all just stopped. As if oblivion was contentment. “Or how about a gunshot wound? Anything that would hurt our investment?”

“He would never have taken your money.”

“And yet, here I am.” The man shrugged. “So who’s lying, me or the corpse?”

Petrier couldn’t know, shouldn’t know. Times were lean in Mariposa and the Bone Boys were just an arm of the largest conglomerate in the City, the Os’ Group. Their hands were in every field in every industry, from defense applications to biotechnical pharmaceuticals. They were the fist, the cruel gloved hand that collected on investments large and small.

“Ok then, maybe he did need your money.” Petrier nodded. “You have his body, that’s what you guys want right? Bones, flesh, memories? You’re butchers in need of meat. So take him.”

“Our contract was for money or living flesh. We don’t deal in old meat.” The man’s splitting mouth curled into an even crueler smile. “His debt falls to his closest family member. And since your brother is no longer with ust, that means such responsibility falls to you.”

“How long has he had this debt?”

“Longer than you’d think.” The man smiled. “ Didn’t you ever notice things just missing?”

Petrier looked down at his father and fought the urge to throw up.“Like what?”

“A bit of flesh here, a memory there.” The man kneeled down in front of Petrier’s father, his long black coat now pooling on the ground. “I’m sure it was nothing you’d ever miss.”

“Is this a shake down?”

“What a cruel way to think about this relationship. I’ve known your father for years, and this is how you treat me? I also lost a friend today.” The man coughed and produced a small card from his coat. It is bone white, and the print is gold leaf seemingly threaded in between the strands of paper. It was silk and expensive. 

“Bite me.” Petrier spat out, brandishing his cleaver in a useless way.

“I do have a job to do, however.” The man continued, clearing his throat in a soulless, purely utilitarian way. As if he didn’t really need to, as if he only did it to make a point. He glanced back down at the card in his hand and began to read aloud, reciting words that he had spoke many, many times before.“My name is Sacha. You do not need to know my last name. Welcome to our little family. Either you, or a loved one who no longer can remediate their debt, has entered into an accord with the Garcons de Os. While we are known for our philanthropy, our enterprise is a business. And so, your debt is.” Sacha pauses reading and pulls a small pocket watch from his pocket. It was silver and featureless, save a single chain attached to somewhere deep in the man’s coat. Petrier remembers a fairy tale his father had taught him, of how Death did not have a heart, but instead a ticking clock. “Eighty six hundred Imperial Thalers. Or equivalent in bones harvested from living specimens. My boss told me to make sure to specify that. Your father’s legs would have done, for example.” Sacha smiled, looking at the two limp legs on the corpse beneath him. Petrier follows his eyeline and grimaces. Could his father have ever saved him from this? “He was a prideful man, wasn’t he?”

Petrier drops his cleaver in shock. He knew he could not kill the Bone Boys and, if he had bested the man in front of him, there would not be a place in Mariposa he could hide where they would not find him. This debt was his now. “Where am I going to find this money?” He exclaimed. “Dad’s shop was barely holding it together as it was?”

“Not my problem.” Sacha responded with a shrug, returning his hands behind him as he started to move. He stepped over Petrier’s father’s corpse, black coat gliding across the floor. He moved past Petrier. The butcher’s breath hitched, Sacha’s watch ticked just a bit faster. It was excited. Petrier’s breath turned to frost. Sacha was at the door now, the wooden thing that Petrier’s father had used to keep the city out of his butcher shop for years. It creaked open, all the while Sacha’s hands did not move from his jacket. “I can offer you some advice though.

Petrier’s eyes couldn’t break away from his cleaver on the floor of his father’s butcher shop. It glistened in the cold light. A tool of violence, used to make a profit. A chicken squeals, as if it knows what fate might befall it. He could slaughter a million birds before he would pay back what his father owed. 

“What.” Petrier responds, shoulders low and voice hollow.

Sacha looks out into Mariposa. A young man stumbles home in the dark in front of him, bottle clenched in his hand. It is unclear if he is Mariposian or an Imperial soldier off duty. To Sacha, to the butcher, it does not matter. A smile crawls back over his face. It is an infectious thing, contorting the rest of Sacha’s face into that of unbridled glee. He turns his head back towards Petrier, eyes glistening and gleaming. They are his father’s eyes.

“They do not need to be your bones.”

[cupoftrembling]

Please

Among the continent of the Shattered Planes, as has been increasingly obvious in my correspondence, the most abundant religious force is the Pantheon of Isosa. This is because, for a multitude of reasons, it is an objective fact. There is no mystery in its worship, no interrogation of why people believe it to be true. They simply have to open their eyes, see the shattered moon that hangs like a watchful eye over their homes. They simply have to look at the tears in the firmament, the stars and constellations that entropy has wrought. They simply have to speak to one of the many spirits or angels that were there at the dawn of time, who fought on either side of the Celestial Civil War. They have to just look at the smile on an old man’s face, or eat a warm meal, or share a laugh to know, somewhere, of the impermanence that The Wolf crept into reality. 

The days pass, and it is all her fault. There is no need to wonder if it is true.

However, this is where I disagree with my contemporaries. Dr. Sutioni or Dr. Mya argues that this blatant fact has led to the dominance of the Isosian religion among the various, pious nations of the Askaven Continent. From the Western Wastes, where Wolf Apostates roam under their godhunter’s watchful eyes, to the forests of the Coalition of the Eastern Kingdoms. Even the Empire of Night, with their Adherence to the Everyman, is a form of Isosian anti-theism. They both argue in a cohesive faith, shared by each of these groups.

But look at the worshipers of the Eastern Kingdoms, who’s faith is so commingled with the state that even their kings claim a divine right to rule. Look even further, to the sects and mystery cults of the different divines within the forests of the kingdoms. The Friends of the Lady of Hounds, the Handmaidens of the Winter Queen, Qoonla’s Lovers. The Wolf Apostates border on atavism, more akin to relic-worship of whatever shards left over from the Celestial Civil War they can find buried among the snow of the Western Wastes. The nomadic orcs of the hinterlands have no structured religion, aside from whatever paladin covens they host, instead focusing on a stronger sort of familiar Lare. Even the strongest sense of a state religion focusing solely on the Isosian pantheon places itself as its opposite, the Adherence to the Everyman. More a philosophical guideline in the Empire of Night, the Adherence is a set of strictures and rules to tradition. To list them all would bore even me, but a common throughline throughout all of them is a form of disgust so obsessive that it borders on reverence. A preoccupation with the wrongs of the gods and their followers that were committed on the ‘every man.’ Humanity becomes divine and perfect, and the tools made by them become even moreso.

These are not the hallmarks of an organized religious force. Each of them are about Isosa and her coven in one way or another, but few are informed by her. The dedicated Isosian faithful are demonstrably fewer than the combined adherents of the other doctrines or philosophies. They keep to the wilds or to select, divided neighborhoods. The cities and outposts that Isosa has dominion over tend to be smaller, isolated affairs, who strive to be self-sufficient in all things. It is demonstrably harder to have the same sort of order and communal understanding that these adherents claim in larger settings.

There were few, if any, Isosian enclaves in the lawless monarchy that is Mariposa. Records indicate that a few neighborhoods banded together under the goddess of order during the reign of Queen Mariposa the Maddened. However, due to citysickness and general apathy towards growth by the faithful, those dissipated within one generation. Their temple, nestled deep within the Upper Wards, still stands. 

The House of Swinging Trees was a tall, granite building, with a relief of alms being given by Isosa to humanity. It was all harsh edges and awkward lines, each converging towards the sky at slants. Made from holy geometry and mathematical precision. It sat in the center of a large and meticulous garden, with stones lining the center of a massive Babylon Willow. The grass that lay between the stones was some of the only for miles, an enclave of natural beauty in the iron and stone city of Mariposa. As if someone had raised the building from the ground, as if someone had hewn this place from the world itself. 

This was what Remiel had been looking for. 

He stood in front of the House of Swinging Trees for what felt like too long. It was just before night time, at the edge of winter. On his back, his loaned greatsword rubbed against a heavy bookbag. A gift, stuffed with knowledge, all of it leading him here. It dug into his shoulders, made his neck strain and hurt. If he wore one or the other, perhaps the awkward pain would not be here. But Remiel felt unsure whether he’d need knowledge or the blade and, one to loath uncertainty, brought both.

At the gate, made of pyrite shined to look like gold, stood an ashen orc. He was wearing no clothes of the scholar or theologian, no bag or book of hours. Under his arm on a single point sling was a shotgun. Remiel could hear its bullet singing to him, feel its call on the back of his neck. The orc was young, then. And the blade looked so large in the child’s eyes. The man in front of him wore a bruise under his eye, and several scratches across his face. From his neck, a single, silver broken fang. He glared at the paladin, rolling his eyes in displeasure.

“Need something, sir?” The orc grunted, words escaping from beyond his silver capped tusks. Between his lips and between his teeth, a cigarette. It smelt of sawdust and datura. “Temple’s closed, if that’s what you’re looking for. Healer is out sick, if you can believe it.”

“Oh um,” Remiel grips the strap of his book bag a bit tighter, as if that might protect him. “Are they alright?”

“Huh?” The orc raised an eyebrow. “How would I know?”

“You work, um, here, right?”

The orc narrows his eyes a bit. “Aye.”

“Well-” Remiel pauses for a second, and then thinks better of pressing the matter. “I guess, yeah, I guess it really doesn't matter. I just heard that you guys have a really good library.”

“We aren’t a charity case, kid. You want books, go to Sans Bernadine University.”

Remiel raised an eyebrow in shock. “Didn’t you hear about it?”

The orc chuckles to himself, shaking his head and crossing his arms. “Yeah, I did. Smelt it too.”

“Yeah, real pity about it.” Remiel frowned, knuckles white on his bookbag.

“Real pity.” The orc states dryly. “So, sorry, guess you’ll have to come back some other day.”

The paladin took a step forward, puffing out his chest in a show of strength. “No, I don’t think I will.”

He was face to face with the orc now, each standing heads taller than an average man. The orc scowled and took his cigarette from out of his mouth. “Yea? And why’s that, tough guy?”

“I am a paladin of Isosa.” Remiel continued, hand moving towards his sword like his rector had taught him. Words fail you, Remiel hears on the shivers of his neck, sense fail you, faith in steel. Remiel bites back the thoughts and hopes, beyond hope, that they are wrong. He speaks again. “And I need to know everything you know.”

The orc looks back at the sword on his back, and then back at the almost soft face in front of him. “Huh, real paladin.” This is all the orc can say.

“Can you please just let me in.” Remiel narrows his eyes. “Please.”

The orc smiles, drops the cigarette from his lips, and snuffs the flame out with his heel. “Sorrow is going to want to hear from you.”

The inside of the House of Swinging Trees was just as cold as the exterior. Granite floors and more pyrite light fixtures. It was lit entirely by candle and by wick, none of the halogen lights of most of the Mariposian homes of the day. Most of the electricity in the city came from large, crystalline bullets in power-factories along the coast. The bullet technology, the trapping of emotions and memories into physical, powerful forms, were considered anathema by the most militant of Isosian followers. They did, however, make an exception for weaponry. There were few arms more effective than the bullet powered firearm, and there were always causes for their use.

On the table next to Remiel were at least half a dozen of these firearms. Their handles and stocks were made from pure alder wood. Harvested in the depth of summer, the season supposedly closest to what the Fractal Fields of Isosa were. These weapons, they are true. They seem more real than the table around them, more situated in their place. Shotguns, pistols, small arms adept in the city style close quarters fighting that one would be familiar with here in Mariposa. There were no long rifles, no things of distance. Remiel had, at one point or another, thought of trading in his long, curving blade for such weapons. He had gotten into a scrape or two here in Mariposa, and while his sword is an effective mark of his station within the paladin’s of Isosa, it did not suit itself for the alleyways that Mariposian combat, often getting caught on the walls and bars that made up the city. He would rely on his words and, when those failed, the gifts his faith and birth had given him. And, throughout this, he felt loath to give up the sword. 

The pistol besides his hand did seem all that more alluring, however.

On the table, next to these weapons of war, were books. The very thing that Remiel had been seeking. The dust covers were still on them, and it had been clear that they had never been opened by the inhabitants of the House of Swinging Trees. The room he was sat in had a window on the far side of it. Through it, he could see the courtyard with the Babylon Willow. He saw a small cambion man, blue with tall, straight horns, pruning a hibiscus bush. His clothing was a white skirt, with the little laces on the edge of it. On his head, tucking in his braided, brown hair, was a large sun hat, keeping the dusk sun from his eyes. The area of the city they were in was not as tall and grand as some of the others, as ambassadors and other men of power tended to like this neighborhood for its simplicity and safety. In the distance, one could see the whole of Queen’s Court, with its titanic skyscrapers covered in equally as mighty rose petals. One could see the sun setting behind the Concordat of Miracles, see the feral angel straining in vain against the iron nails driven through its wings. Out there, that is Mariposa. Towering and true. Above it, Imperial Warballoons cover the city like a dense haze, with little mechanized men flying between them. Green and gold banners hang from the edge of the balloons, each denoting a crescent moon with a sword driven through them, lest Mariposa forget who now rules it.

But here, in this temple, this could not be Mariposa, not really. The House of Swinging Trees was grand, certainly, but did not extend as far as the buildings around it. The gardens were manicured and delightful, each fit to burst with fruit that did not taste like sickly sweet perfume. Each of the blades of grass are the same length. Each of the doors are the same size, just a bit too short for Remiel to comfortably fit in. Each of the people housed here are all the same amount of driven, keen and sharp in their direction.

They’re all so like his home growing up. A little cabin in the fields somewhere in the Eastern Kingdoms. Always with three logs burning in the fireplace and small bushes in front of the windows. There was a scent of aspen on the breeze, despite there being no such forest near by the rolling fields of barley and grain. His father had described it as paradise after the hell of the Ibi-Vujčić Conflict. Where that was fire, this was calm, where that was storm, this was peace. He would sit in the dirt for hours, marveling at the sapphire beatles sitting on the leaves. Remiel once, and only once, saw Ferdinand, his father, reach his hand towards one of them, as to join them in their commiseration before his mother placed her hand on his shoulder. The beatles flew away, the moment over. They even had a babylon willow shadowing the house. Remiel would sit under its branches, trace his hands along its weeping branchlets like parting water. The leaves were always dryer, like it was a land of always autumn. A secret, private little enclave, just before the winter made them hunker in. Remiel never remembered the winter ever arriving, or the sweltering heat of summer. It was always in that secret liminal space, incapable of moving beyond or backwards.

Remiel placed his hand on the cold stone of the windowsill. There was no insulation between the walls and the outside, as it was made entirely out of stone and faith. The building was drafty and inhospitable to any of those not touched by Isosa’s constant contentment. Remiel felt a shiver fall down his spine. There was a biting, and blood in the mouth, and a shattering. And then it was over.

“It is quite a view.” A voice came from behind him. It was not a cold voice, but distant. Authoritative. It sounded, for only a moment, like his mother’s. He spun around, half convinced it was her. It was not, dear reader. She was shorter, first of all. Her skin was green and from her this infernal heat arose. Her tail curled around her right leg like a snake, a sign of piety and respect. Her horns were backswept and her hair was in a bun with a silver spear through the back of it. She smiled plainly, leaving dimples in her cheeks and no creases in her eyes. A cambion. Remiel fought the urge to look disappointed, a battle he did not win.

The woman winced in a sort of ego-pain at the paladin’s face, quickly dropping the smile. Remiel noticed her discomfort and brought his hands in front of him, fingers splayed in some sort of deference. “Oh my god, I am so sorry, miss. I j- I just thought you were someone. Someone I knew, someone else.”

“Ah,” The woman regained her smile, placing her hands behind her back. “No offense taken, paladin. I would, too, be disappointed if I thought I knew someone in this city, only for the truth to rip such comfort away from me.”

Remiel let out a sigh of relief, clearly believing whatever this woman was saying. She stood tall, with an impeccably straight back. Her hooves clopped against the floor, her gait was measured and disarming in its grace. “Your doorman, Clovis. He said you were the Abbess.”

The cambion nodded. “Mother Superior Brightwind, but please, Sorrow will suffice.”

“Brightwind?” Remiel repeats. “I know of a Vera Brightwind in Varak, I met pilgrims traveling to her abbey.”

Sorrow sucks air in between her teeth. They are sharp and the air tastes like holding onto a rosebush so hard you bleed. She exhales such violence and looks towards the floor. “My half sister. When my father remarried, he moved to the hinterlands.”

“Is religious leadership in your family then?” Remiel asked with a genuine curiosity.

Sorrow blinked once, and then twice. She was not used to personal, prying questions. It was not in the nature of her order to truly care. “My mother ran a paladin school in Karnata, before it's fall.”

Remiel smiled. “I see, you come by it honestly, then.”

“Truthfully,” Sorrow responds in a moment of un-vigilance, looking out towards the city. She stares at the space where the Sans Bernadine tower once stood, now a smoldering ruin. “This is a relatively new position.”

“I heard stories of the House of Swinging Trees from my rector. I thought it was abandoned years ago.” Remiel follows her eyeline, looking at the Concordat of Miracles. Both think they are looking at the same thing. “I’m really impressed by how you rebuilt it.”

“I’m.” Sorrow’s breath caught in her mouth. “Thank you, Ser Fey.”

Remiel looks back at her. “Remiel.” He pauses again. “Please.”

“I’m not too used to a paladin complimenting me, is all.”

“Yeah,” Remiel looks back out the window, this time looking at the now setting sun. “I don’t think a lot of people get compliments from us."

“That is my experience too.”Sorrow looks back at him with a face unreadable to me. “Why are you here, Ser Fey?” Sorrow asks what should be a question, but the words in her mouth can’t help but form a demand.

Remiel looks at her and frowns. He paces back towards the table and begins to flip through a book awkwardly. “Have, um, you heard from Isosa. At all, in the last couple years?”

Sorrow looks at the pages he is flipping through, unable to tell what he is looking at, if anything at all. Her fists ball in absent flame for just a moment. Is it a challenge? Is this an inquisition? Has someone questioned her faith? The air lionized with truth, she can feel Remiel’s magic begin to worm it's way into her mouth. It tastes like apricots and, somewhere distant, Remiel’s eyes glow.

“No.” Is all Sorrow ever could have said. She is not strong enough to lie.

The aura of truth fades, and so does the light in Remiel’s eyes. “None of the leadership I’ve talked to. It's been about twelve years since anyone mortal has heard from her. Same for the angels.” Remiel lets out a sigh. He hates using that. It is like holding a breath in his stomach, in his veins. To force a compulsion, it is like having air in your blood, or a dagger at your neck. “That's why I’m here, in Mariposa. It’s like she’s just gone.”

Sorrow blinks again. She fights the rising feeling of relief in her. Her mother always told her of hearing their goddess’s voice, guiding her, showing her the Grand Weft. Sorrow had never heard such things, not even in her childhood. When Sorrow looked to the sky, pleaded for some sort of guidance, she heard nothing. Only sweet, mortal silence. How lonely, how dreadfully lonely, Sorrow thought. She felt the bile of anger, or maybe resentment, rise in the back of her throat. Remiel stood before her, gleaming and resplendent in Isosa’s light, locs braided so tightly that it must have been divine. There must not have been a moment in his life that he had ever felt so alone, where the comfort of Isosa’s voice was not there to guide him.

Sorrow clenched her fingers a bit tighter, the room got just a bit hotter, and a bead of sweat began to roll down Remiel’s brow. He was everything she had ought to be. Servile and guided, never left in the abyss of having to make his own choices, or live with his own mistakes. To choose between a daughter and husband would have been no choice to him, even as the flames of The Wolf licked the back of his neck. He would not look at his daughter's eyes and wonder if he made the right choice. He would simply know, and that would be all he could ever need.

And then, she remembered. 

He was just as lost as she was. He heard no divine choir or voice. Isosa had condemned them all, the powers of the church, to that cruel silence. His hands gripped the table, he had sought Sorrow out on his own, just as unsure as she was. There was no guidance here, no path to follow. A commiseration of grasping in the dark. A concordat of loneliness. And then her hands relaxed in un-vigilance. But the room still felt just as warm, burning in absent flame.

“Sorrow?” Remiel asks in genuine concern. He takes a step towards her, hands out in front of him like she was a wild animal. The room is spinning, the world is spinning. “Hey, hey, are- hey are you ok?”

“Huh?” Sorrow responds uncharmingly. She grasps the bookshelf next to her. “No, I'm ok.” She sucks in air. “Why?”

“You look like you just saw a ghost.” The paladin responds, stepping towards her again. And, on the back of his neck, he sees her for how she really is. Knees are bowed, the wind blows through her, her hands shake and try to find purchase. A cruel part of Remiel knows she is weak, and a voice that sounds like his mother almost commands him to excise the weakness from his church. These voices are ghosts, dear readers, shivers of a dying world. Remiel sucks air in through his teeth and forces these ghosts back into the past. “I just wanted. To make sure.” His voice is similarly shaky.

“Citysickness gets the best of us, I’m afraid.” Sorrow lies. Does he know? That she, for a moment, doubted him? Resented him? Had that moment of unvigilance disguised his aura of truth from probing her mind yet again? Did he feel her call on that absent flame? She sees the bead of sweat on Remiel’s brow. “Please, for my own sake, pay it no mind.”

Remiel nods, and the perspiration falls from his brow. “Then I will, Miss Brightwind.”

Sorrow lets her borrowed breath out, centers herself, and is relieved. “You mentioned Mariposa. Why here?”

Remiel takes the sword from off of his back, rolls his aching shoulders, and then places a heavy book on the table next to him. His bookbag swings lightly against his hip. It is a worn, orange covered text, with gold lettering just barely starting to fade. It is a worn copy of Contemporaneous Reports of the Celestial Civil War from its Veterans by Dr. Blair Allcott. “This text, it guided me here.”

Sorrow walks to the table, footfalls more sure now, and places her hand on the cover of the text. It was… academic. There were no other words that Sorrow knew on how to describe it. And she was equally unsure of why a Paladin of Isosa would care for it. “What… did you find in it?”

“Truthfully, not much. An interesting read, but most of the discussions were, um, really dry. And not at all really relevant to Isosa’s disappearance.” Remiel flips the book open, skimming through the well worn pages. A faint smile on his face, a wind from the west. His father has it open on one knee, Remiel on the other. Better times. “I couldn’t use any of the techniques in the book, but it led me to Dr. Mya.”

“The author?”

“Yes! I met her, she’s a delightful woman.” Remiel beamed this smile so warm it almost made Sorrow blush. He flipped through the pages again, until the book was back on its front. He frowns, and the room goes cold. “Unfortunately, her research has been destroyed.”

“The Sans Bernadine riots.” Sorrow blinks. “I’ve… heard about them.”

“Yea, she told me they were all in the spire when it went up in flames.” Remiel sighed. “All that knowledge lost, all that work destroyed. Centuries of books. It’s a shame.”

Sorrow stares blankly. Does he know? If he does, the only way to survive is to strike now. Strike true, Sorrow. Trust not your senses, trust not your eyes, faith in steel. These are the words her mother taught her. The maxim of the Paladin’s of Isosa. She could get one, maybe two shots in before he would be on her. But, ultimately, he would break her, dash her on his sword. And he would be right to. She was there, at the burning of the spire. She tasted his work turn to ash on her tongue. He smiles at her, and she did nothing to stop them. Kill him, he threatens Order. Past the window, she sees the feral angel, and thinks she hears her voice. Anathema, he is as lost as you are. 

“It is a shame.” Sorrow responds blankly. Her hand trembles. Her fingers reach for her trigger. He knows.

“Yeah,” Remiel sighs, not even noticing his companion’s trembling, doesn’t even feel the knife at his throat. “But, it wasn’t all fruitless.” He looks up at her, beaming smile. It is radiant and scouring and even Sorrow could not interpret it as something it was not. “I spoke to her, I think I have an idea of what we need to do.” All Sorrow can do is look at him, her eyes squinting against his radiance. He hurt to look at but there was nothing else she could have done. He was resplendent, she knows this. Next to him, she is dim. Behind him, the sun halos his hair. In her mouth, all she can taste is apricots and pride. 

She fights the urge to retch.

“What do you need of me, Ser Fey?”

“The first step is to get a relic of Isosa’s, something she personally touched.” Remiel produces a small journal from his bookbag. Green leather cover, with a small, segmented chrysanthemum embossed on the front in gold. It is new, there is no crease in the hardened leather from use. It cost thirty-six Imperial Thalers, from a small hawking stand somewhere in the Upper Wards of the city. Remiel produces a small pen from his pocket and flips the book open to one of the first pages. His speech becomes clear, his eyes dart between the illustrations on the pages. He is focus, assurity. “And something that had met her before. An angel, maybe. A construct from the war. Something sentient, but not mortal.” He looks down at his own hand, at the pores in his skin. His light fades, just a moment. “I’m, uh, not sure why, but it can’t be mortal.”

Sorrow narrows her eyes and takes a step closer to Remiel’s field notes. There are two sets of handwriting. One is in cursive, with long, connected continents that make the words flow together. It is nigh unreadable at its face, but Sorrow is sure of the contents of every stroke, almost as if the words are laced with some sort of acausal magicks. Meaning is imprinted on the lines of the text, imparting knowledge through observation, but not recognition. It could have been written in celestial script, and Sorrow would have always known what it had said. The other is in shorthand, with scratchy acronyms and unsure handwriting. It is shaky, and doesn’t follow the lining of the paper well. Despite being written, ostensibly, in print, it is much harder to interpret content or meaning. The two texts weave together, adding on and commenting on various different drawings, both equally made in each style. Dissections that look as if they were pulled right from the air, and cosmology that is so convoluted that even a religious woman like Sorrow can not understand them. They are, somehow, in synch at every moment. 

Remiel brings his pen down to the page and adds more shorthand script, describing, what Sorrow can only imagine, is whatever content he will glean from this meeting. He dates the top of his notes, sixty-third day of the Third Year of Queen Mariposa the Negligent, and looks back up at Sorrow. It is an expectant look, a look of directionlessness. It is a look familiar to Sorrow, every time she looks in the mirror. He needs her guidance, her grace. Sorrow smiles a bit. It is a litigious grin. A grin made famous by the first queen of Mariposa. A grin dotted on every mural of Queen Mariposa the Litigious, right as she tricks Isosa into letting her guard down. It is the grin of the knife up your sleeve, it is ‘fucking the other guy before he fucks you,’ it is knowing beyond all knowing that the man in front of you must die.

Remiel looks up from his page and does not know. The smile in front of him is genuine, it is guiding. It is all teeth. He smiles back. He thinks of a joke his classmate had once told him, about the smiling abbess. It’s a common joke shared among the orders of paladins. About a ruler with fangs being the only thing that could make an abbess smile. “Everything ok?” He responds, half in jest

“You said it can’t be a mortal.” Sorrow leans forward, eyes shadowed and glowing. “What about a hound?”

And Remiel understands.

Autumn is the season of treachery.

It is the season of guile and of luck. A cantankerous superstition that is held by almost every society on the Shattered Planes. During the Celestial Civil War, the Autumn Court of the Wyld joined with the Wolf in rebellion against a court structure that had long reviled them. It was a simple choice, really. Before the Wolf’s Rebelion, there was only one option. Calm servility under the boot of the fey queens. When war broke out, there was something inviting in the flames of The Wolf. It is only fitting, then, that the element most associated with the Autumn Fey was the treacherous fire. The Summer Court had crackling lightning, the Winter Court’s ensnaring frost, and the Spring Court with their regressive amber. But the Autumn Court, they were hoisted the element of change, forced to mantle a raw, possessive magick even before it was associated with the Wolf.

This is why I balk when scholars attribute the hatred of the autumn season with its fey counterpart. Even before that rapturous flame consumed the Autumn Court, before the cruel hands of the clock had started to tick, the queens and regents of the Wyld had long reviled the autumn season. They were the tricksters in the fairy tales, hucksters and gamblers with stolen names and currency. Their Alder King was shrouded in mystery and in myth, with no face nor identity whatsoever. They were the boogeyman that scared the fey children who were never supposed to grow up. Their fall was predicated on that history, not the other way around.

This fear of the autumn, of the dying of the light, replicated itself across the survivors of the Celestial Civil War. In the Eastern Kingdoms, autumn was a time where no work was supposed to be conducted. Harvest is to be conducted late in the summer and then you are not to leave your doors until the first snowfall. To such an end, social philosophers skilled in accelerationist magicks spend countless days channeling power into the land. Either to keep them from falling or to hasten their fall. They do not allow them to change from green to orange and the sky is filled with stars or snow. And, in the autumn of the 89th year of Queen Mariposa the Licentious, the Economic District burned to the ground. I saw it light up the horizon, flames stretching far and wide into the pillaring skyscrapers that once dotted its land. 

This is where Callan knew he could find her. 

This is a place once kissed by the Alder King’s treacherous season; it is known that tricksters follow tricksters. The ruined buildings and burned out homes smelled familiar to the outrider knight. The moon hung low in the sky and the air was still, somehow after five years, laden with smoke. If a witch could not be found here, out of all places in Mariposa, then she could not be found anywhere. Callan ran his hand through his hair, shaking the soot from it. It was longer, now, than when his queen had shaped it for him. He had grown it out absentmindedly over the last few months. Let it run wild and fallow. It was a mistake, something that had simply slipped his mind. If he had cared to will it to not grow, he could have. He balled his fist in the flaming scarlet hair, fingers interwoven in his braid. He’d have to cut it before he saw his queen again. Make it more in line with what she wanted it to be. She had given him that hair, it was not Callan’s to change. But he wouldn’t have to change it yet. He could grow it longer. Or shave it all off. He grips the hair a bit tighter, as if his hand was engulfed in a heatless flame.

Besides him, squatters sit in a burned out building. The wall was broken behind them, revealing the rest of the home and, further, the alleyway. Their garb is long and flowing, with their limbs bound in tight fabrics. Their long cloaks were adorned in round bits and bangles that sounded like rumbling thunder when they moved. They made a small, smokeless fire in front of them. They cradled it in their hands like a child and, behind their masked faces, Callan can see an equal amount of glee. They chanted in woeful prayer, litanies against the cold. The flames responded in kind, crackling and breaking in tune. These were the apostates of the Wolf, this Callan is certain of. They were once relegated to the Western Wastes in exile and rarely left it in fear of sectarian reprisal. They are the tricksters of the Isosain, the boogeyman that lurks in the heart of every man. The fall that was the consequence of pride.

Callan looked at them with an unknown feeling in his chest. Pity? Pride? Recognition? He is not sure, and as a consequence neither am I. And both of us revile such uncertainty. If there is a mystery, it must be revealed. If there is a secret, it must be uncovered. We are both cowards in that way. Callan took a step towards them, his figure shadowed in the crumbling doorway. He placed his hand against the ashen wood, flames of autumn reigniting deep in the heartwood for but a brief moment. The apostates, shocked by the sudden intrusion of a stranger, clasped the fire closer to their hearts. Their clothes did not singe, but their skin began to blister and burn from the flame. There were no enemies here in Mariposa, but reflex is reflex.

“Ahoy.” Callan raised a hand in sympathy. A single, lick of flame darted between his fingers. “Friend, not foe.”

One of the apostates lowers his white mask, revealing a stubbly chin and toothy grin. He lowered his hood, his ringed fingers gliding across the fabric with the delicate grace of a dancer. He was, once, back in the Eastern Kingdoms, before one poisoned word drove him west. “You’re a part of no Da’as.” The man motioned to Callan’s clothing, to the large fur coat that hung off his back.

Callan nodded and took a step forward. “I am not.”

“I didn’t know fire was popular outside of our Da’as.” The man’s companion added, visibly relaxing somewhat. “Poor publicity, I suppose.”

“It can be popular in the east, if you look close enough.”

The man with the stubbly chin smiles. “If you go east far enough, you eventually find yourself west.” 

Callan narrows his eyes somewhat. “I’ve never been one for the horizon.”

“Could have fooled me.”

“You ever thought about heading to the wastes?” The man’s companion responded, unaware of whatever innuendo was shared between those two. His teeth were blunt, as were his words. His hands were clumsy and unken to fire. But he had kind eyes, and that crease where his smile folds his brow. “I know Isosian’s are not too friendly to fire.”

“I fear only one, and that is not Isosa.” Callan smiles at the man with blunt teeth. “But I will say, I understand the sentiment.”

“Come, sit for a spell.” The man with the stubbly chin slaps the floor next to him, kicking up ash and dust. “I’m Jiro of Da’as Cerena, my forward friend is Martine, of the same.”

“Martine? Mariposian name, no?” Callan sat down across from the fire. “How does it feel to be home again?”

“Ah, I am not home, though.” Martine rubbed his palms together furtively. “I am an outcast even in this place.”

“And yet,” Callan adds his warmth to the fire. “Here you are.”

“You’ve yet to introduce yourself, stranger.” Jiro asks.

“Where are my manners!” Callan smiles. “You may call me Callan.”

Jiro nods. “Pleasure.”

“Charmed!” Martine beams. “What brings you to the Great Butterfly, my friend Callan?”

“I am but a tourist, a visitor here.” Callan gesticulates with his free hand. With it the flames dance and flicker, as if following some sort of conductor. “I could ask the very same of you, my new friends. Mariposa is far from the wastes. I’m sure such a trek was perilous for you.”

“Our wayward brothers, the Isosian’s bothered us very little, actually.” Jiro stares into the fire. He leans against the half broken wall behind him in a show of relaxation. “We had more trouble with the terrain than we did with the lash.”

“Our Da’as moved with us.” Martine reaches inside his cloak and pulls out a smoked peach. He breaks off a piece with grubby fingers and hands it to Callan, across the fire. Callan, unaccustomed to gifts, does not take it. Martine shrugs and brings the dried fruit to his lips. After a moment, he continues. “Cerena values hospitality, if you care to stay with us for a spell.”

“I’ve heard all the wastrals keep such virtues.” Callan nods, closing his eyes slightly and taking in the sweet smoke. This wood had been burnt many times before, by many transients. Its bark was coated white with ash and soot. But yet, it still manages to light just the same. Its heartwood is a deep, burnt orange. Like autumn had seeps deep into its being. It looked like a sky on fire, like a birchwood in the throws of a fall. “If I am to stay with one, I am to stay with all.”

“There are no Isosians here, friend.” Martine sits up a bit tighter, eyes catching sparks like fireflies. “What is there to be afraid of in a hot meal?”

“It is not the heat I fear.” Callan chuffs. “I just do not need such comfort at the moment.”

“Perhaps that is what we seek in Mariposa proper.” Jiro traces his finger along the ashy dirt. The heat of the fire suffused them. Warded them from the cold. It was spring, now, in Mariposa. And yet, after the autumn fires, the Economic District was laden with that sodden chill. The air was thick with that dampness, as if the world itself was attempting to douse the absent flame with tears overflowing. The everburning wood was thick with wet. It was suffused with that lung sticking petrichor and the clouds hung low and dark in the sky. 

And yet, even here, transients huddle. Mired in cold and wet rain, they congregate here. Callan looked at his companions, if not in name then in circumstance. Their shoulders were covered in dew, their cloaks were soaked through. But they had traveled miles towards Mariposa on sore feet and a dream. What was Mariposa to them? Callan could not know. To him, Mariposa was an iron cage. A task to be completed and then never thought of ever again. Overhead, the jackboots float their mechanized balloons across the air like lead dandelion seeds. Each with a gun and a will to kill. These facts prevented him from knowing.

“The people who rule this place hate your faith.” Callan grits his teeth. “Hate you. This is not comfort.” 

“No.” Jiro smiles, his eyes cast low towards the flame. “But it might be one day.”

“No matter how many times the flames go out.” Martine smiles, too, looking at Callan bright and beaming. “We can always rekindle it.”

Callan brings his knees to his chest. If Lucius could see him, if anyone of the Primrose could see him, would they laugh? Would they chide him? Would they join in? He gritted his teeth, trying to grind the uncertainty out of his fangs. “Would it even be the same fire?” He asks, voice low under the crackle of the flames.

“That doesn’t matter.” Martine leans forward somewhat, as if to hear Callan all the more clearly. Like it was some secret the two needed to share. “As long as the fire burns.”

“Apostasy.” A voice comes from the warped doorway. “I will stand no more of it.”

All three whip their heads towards the voice. It was still, like a nail moving against glass. Each modulation made some deep part of Martine and Jiro flinch. Like a child from a nun’s ruler. They covered their hands, dowering the fire in a moment’s notice. The coals sputter and sizzle, keeping the flame deep in their hearts. The woman in the doorway with the voice that sounded like breaking glass held a gun in her hands. A revolver. A long, fanged barrel, mouth open and dripping with heat. Her finger was over the trigger, thumb on the hammer, both trembling. Her skin was this infernal green and her eyes glowed with a familiar, golden hue. She was an abbess, something about that gun made it eminently clear. It was more real than she was. It was the absence of flame, whereas fire is shifting and impermanent, that gun was sure and true. It was all hard edges and secant lines.

Behind her was a towering man. On his shoulders were a sheath and a bookbag, his hair woven tightly in locs, tight to his scalp and coming up around his shoulders. His dress is plain, for Mariposa at least. A white, billowing shirt. Skin like smooth, polished obsidian. Hair smells strongly of apricot and honey. He looked like he was pulled straight from a bodice ripper. He looked at the woman next to him almost like a lost dog. He looked like a paladin, of this they are all sure. It is in the way the sun seems to halo his head, in the way that the clouds part but the oppressive wet does not. He did not look at the men on the ground in front of him, as if they didn’t even register in his vision. Callan knew, however, that he was under this paladin’s intense scrutiny.

Callan stands up, dusts himself off. This is not his fight. For a moment, he thinks to give Martine a compassionate look. A thanks for the peach, if only in offer. He fights the desire, but it is still there. He continues to look at abbess and smiles a litigious smile. “I was unaware there was a contingent of Isosian’s here.” 

“Would that have changed your behavior?” The paladin responds. “We’re a response to the Wolf, not a threat to keep good behavior.”

The abbess glares at the paladin. “Remiel.” Her voice is condescending, barely contained disgust at how wrong he is.

“Is that your name?” Callan interjects. “An odd one.”

“My mother picked it.” Remiel looked at the abbess again, almost bashfully, answering the question implied. “Beyond that, I’m not sure.” 

“It's an old name, in an old language.” Callan shrugs. “I’m surprised a learned man does-”

“That is enough, Callan.” The abbess’ voice is steady, authoritative. She speaks and the world needs to listen. “That is enough.”

“Right,” Callan bristles. He motions to the men behind him. They are scared and in their hands are guns. “I take it you’re here for these two.” 

“I am not.” The abbess responds. “But I am unsurprised that dogs congregate.”

Callan raises an eyebrow. His hand moves towards the hilt of his sword. 

“You two.” Remiel raises a sword at the wastrals behind Callan. They raise their guns in kind, fingers trembling. Their feet are unsteady, the recoil from their shot would knock them to the ground. In another world, if they are to fire, they would certainly miss. “I need you to leave.”

“Remiel?” The abbess snaps her head towards the paladin. The wastrels back towards the broken down wall behind them. In a moment, they are gone. 

“I don’t want to fight if I do not have to.” Remiel glares at the abbess but for a moment. Authority. It is pure and boring. For a moment, he is his mother. And order must be restored. Never questioned, never flinched. He has a ruling and he will be listened to. “Do I have to fight?”

“Only if I have to.” Callan responds. In that moment of distraction, of petty un-vigilance, he has drawn his sword. In his other hand, a curved staff topped with a carved, dragon’s head. The abbess curses under her breath. “Two on one doesn’t exactly seem a fair fight.”

“Isosa is not the goddess of fairness.” The abbess sneers. “I am not surprised you fail to grasp such a distinction.”

“Is- is this the one we’re looking for?” Remiel asks. His hands are gripping his twisted greatsword, one hand on the hilt, another choked up on the blade, just below the parrying hooks. A duelist's stance, to control the blade tighter in the close quarters. Callan knew Remiel was no amateur. It was instruction beat into him. “Sorrow, please tell me this is the right person.”

“He’s the hound you need.” Abbess Sorrow responds. “Trust not your eyes, trust not your senses.”

Remiel closes his eyes. He breathes in through his nose. Out through the mouth.“Faith in steel.”

It is Callan that strikes first, while Remiel is busy focusing himself. He brings his curved sword down against the flat of Remiel’s blade. Sparks fly as metal clashes, steel grinds against steel. There is an ear-raking sound and Remiel’s bladepoint heads down. Soot is kicked up in the air. The room grows warm in absent flame. Sorrow takes a step back from Remiel and smiles a litigious smile. Callan rears his other arm back, drawing the staff like a viper. His muscles contract, tighten like a piano wire. 

His foot shifts underneath him, twisting backwards in a moment. Soot and ash and flame kick up in its wake, throwing that pyroclastic flow into the air. He thrusts the head of the staff at Remiel’s throat, an attempt to knock him off guard, disarm the paladin before he can retaliate. This is what Callan has on Remiel, surprise and guile. The tools of the autumn fey. Sorrow can not see through the obscuring smoke. She believes that Callan’s blade will find Remiel’s heart. And that would be just. Anathema.

Remiel can see.

His eyes do not follow Callan’s blade, it is not the deadly weapon in this circumstance. It is in how his muscles contract. Remiel can see the strands that make Callan, sees them tighten, sees the way energy flows in his body. He sees the nestle of flame in Callan’s heart, sees how it channels that fire. He knows the sword is to parry. The sword is the distraction, the rattler on the tale. That cane, that is where death is. That is the object that will unmoor him. It will open him up to what actual hatred this Callan has in his mind. The soot obscures his eyes, burns the edges of his retina. Trust not your eyes. The cane is moving faster now, it would be easy to bring his sword to Callan’s feet. This is what his rector would have done. Callan has left himself open to a brazen counter attack. He has no faith his opponent would be bold enough to go on the attack, let alone a paladin of Isosa. This is what would unmake him. Trust not your senses. This is what his mother would have done. Pressed the attack, take that giant greatsword and unmake Callan right now. 

Faith in steel.

Remiel breaks his grip from his sword’s ricasso just as Callan’s cane passes it. He can feel the hot wind from the staff, feels it cut the air to ribbons. At the same moment, he twists his other shoulder, following the bladepoint into the ground. It brings Callan’s blade with it, locked in rapturous sound with the parrying hooks of his blade. His hand grabs Callan’s at the same point his blade’s edge hits the soot. He drops the greatsword, the one thing a paladin is never to do, his bookbag hitting his lower back. His hands divert Callan’s cane away from where it would strike. He thinks to throw the man, to continue his momentum and force this man to the ground. But something about how the energy flowed around the pirate, something about that ungodly heat and warmth that leaks from the edges of him, makes him reconsider. 

Callan’s hair stands on edge. The trick his mentor had taught him, the trick that had forsaken many other bladesmen, had failed. His cane flies through the air, now shunned from the kill it so desperately needed. His blade knocked loose from his fingers. His eyes lock with Abbess Sorrow, smiling a familiar smile. It is the smile of Queen Mariposa the Litigious and it is a smile that Callan wears well. In her hand that baneful revolver. She is cycling the cylinder with her thumb. Waiting. Expectant. Like these two are carrion. Like these two are meat.

And Callan refuses to be meat.

He does not know it, but that is the only thought that writhes through his head. How much, at that moment, even beyond Remiel or even beyond Maeve or even beyond his target, he wishes to kill this woman smiling his smile back at him. He knows, for a moment, what it is like to hate the autumn The deception, the guile, the backhanded smile. That is all he has known the autumn to be. And, dear reader, he hates how good it makes him feel. It is a feeling that starts in his heart, a feeling that starts in his gut and in his muscles. It radiates to his fingers, to the tip of his nose, something coiled at the base of himself, desperate for release. Remiel’s back is turned towards his abbess and her hungry, hungry eyes. The air catches fire.

“I knew it.” The abbess smiles.

Arcs of flame smolder between Callan’s fingers, following odd lines and trajectories of travel. They are like birch leaves in fall. White spats of superheated air crackle and singe near the heads of his fingers. His hand lets the sword fall to the ground, knuckles white and fingers balled in flame. They are close now and Remiel can see Callan’s face now. The teeth barred, breath hot and heavy. He looks like he needed to bite Remiel, looks like his teeth grow long. His neck, now exposed from the long of his lapel, looked raw and worn, as if it was held by a cold iron choker. Like whoever held the leash held it tight. Callan is rabid, of this Remiel is sure. The paladin’s feet move backwards, kicking up the dusty ash of the floor. 

Callan swipes to the left, the paladin slides to the right. Flame barely misses the tip of his nose. Licks of burning air fly off the edge of the fire, illuminating Remiel’s dark skin like starlight. Dusk and embers whorl around the two of them, caught in the updraft of their conflict. Remiel eyes his discarded sword. Callan eyes Sorrow’s gun. She has leveled it at Remiel’s back and at Callan’s heartflame. Her finger is off the trigger, for now.

“Tired paladin?” Callan asks through ragged breath. Fire takes its toll and the air was laden with ash. 

“Maybe.” Remiel’s shoulders heave, the bookbag on his back feeling heavier than usual. His sword is next to Callan’s feet, if he goes for it, Callan can strike him. End him. “You don’t look perfect yourself.”

“The city, it chokes me.” He sneers. “Nothing more.”

Remiel raises an eyebrow. What did he mean by that? Nowhere, not in any scriptures, did Mariposa stand at odds with wolfkin. If anything, this leaden city would embolden agents of chaos. He thinks for a moment to look back at Sorrow, to look for guidance. An unseen fire cracks behind him, the cycling of Sorrow’s gun. 

A round wizzes past Remiel’s ear, the air boiling in its wake. The paladin’s skin is warm, almost singing from the momentum of the round. It is like an absent flame, all the oppressive, destructive heat of fire with none of its warmth. None of its purpose. Somewhere, birds fly from their perch. Somewhere, a heart stops. It is the death of all things and it hits Callan square in the shoulder. His eyes grow wild and the force of the shot throws him to the dusty floor, feet tumbling over his torso. The fire, for a moment, dims. Remiel whips his head back towards Sorrow.

“What was that?” He shouts over the ringing in his ears. He stands from his half lurch. In a moment, and without Remiel noticing, his sword is back in his hand. “Sorrow, what did you just do?”

Sorrow canters her wrist, gun tilting at an odd angle. Air sublimates off of its barrel. It is shimmering with that dreadful, baleful heat. Remiel, for the first time, sees it. Sees that gun in her hand. Sees how it catches the light. It is a weapon made of broken glass, dripping with absent flame and refracted light. On the edges of it, rending jagged glass shards stick into the hands of the user. It is a weapon made from the shattering of hope and it is more real than she is. Her hand drips with blood. It is the only thing that is not burning.

“He would strike you again.” She replies. Her feet are shoulder’s width apart, her torso is tilted slightly. It is the stance of a killer. “I would not stand him to do so. Move.”

“You don’t have the authority to tell me that, Sorrow.” His voice is low, furtive. He tries not to sound like a petulant child.

“You waste your time, paladin.” She lilts at the end of her sentence, drawling his title into singsong mockery. She levels her gun towards him again. “Even now, he plots behind you.”

“That’s you, isn’t it.” He motions towards the gun in her hands. “That’s the real you. Whatever’s standing in front of me, that’s just the thing that shepherd's you from place to place.”

“Is it so bad to be something?” She places her free hand under the grip of the revolver. When he moves, that is when she will shoot. Her hands drip with absent flame. She can see it in his eyes, he is lost. He is what will make her lost again. This is just. Anathema. “Remiel, please. I need you to trust me.”

“You burn, Sorrow.” Remiel levels his sword against her, point lining up with the barrel of the pistol. “You’re burning already and you don’t even know it.”

Sorrow sucks air in. Her eyes go wild. Her hands tremble. 

The air catches fire. 

She is faster than Remiel is. The crack of heat lighting shatters outwards from that gun, gold and amber aurora flashing from where the bullet meets the frame. The air is thick with fire and with heat. The bullet crawls its way into Remiel’s torso, tearing and rending away skin and muscle. Remiel does not feel it. Trust not your senses. He is movement, he is momentum. His sword is in both of his hands and Remiel has broken into a sprint. He will spear her, dash her against his blade. He does not feel it, he can not feel it. He does not feel the bullet rending him, does not feel his muscles separating from each other. His heart beats fast, faster than it has in years. His skin is no longer diseased and he can not feel whatever was clawing at him. 

He can not feel it.

The round misses his heart by inches. The recoil of the shot throws Sorrow’s hand into the air, obscuring Remiel in the barrel of the gun. He is fast, but he has momentum. Inertia will kill him. She feints, jerking her body left but moving right. He will move past her, of this she is sure. As sure as the gun in her hand. She cycles the cylinder, rotating the bullet into a stronger position. Energy crackles in her hand. She will have killed a paladin and then a wolfkin. She is strong, and that is purpose enough. 

True to her thought, Remiel shoots past her by inches. Her mouth twists and contorts into that litigious grin without her even knowing. She wears, now, the mask of Mariposa. Every bit of hatred and scorn that this city has ever had is in Sorrow. Sorrow wishes she hated this feeling, she wishes it did not feel so good. She levels her gun against Remiel. He is in her sights. He kicked off an errant piece of architecture, forcing his body back towards his murderer. He is fast, but he is not fast enough. Sorrow sees it, sees the glowing amber blood drip from his skin. Sees his heart beating fast in his chest. She knows where she needs to shoot. She moves her finger over the trigger. It cuts her. She bleeds. This is just.

And then, fire.

There is fire between the two of them. Remiel is lost in its conflagration. There is heat and purpose in this flame. It is orange and yellow like birch trees in autumn and Sorrow knows. She looks to her side, her grin leaking from her lips. It is Callan. He is on the ground, shoulder dripping soot from his wound. It leaks out of him like magma, like some great wound in the earth extolling fire as virtue. Hair is in his eyes, and she can see now. See past the soot and the ash, she can see him. His hair is not the color of autumn. It is the color of blood. His hands are wrapt in fire. His face a familiar, Mariposian, grin. An infectious thought crosses her mind. It is luminous. Like a lighthouse at sea. It forces any sense or sensation from her thoughts. It forces her to think how much better it looks on him than on her.

Remiel crests through the flames at a speed that could break bones. Flames dance from off of his skin and off of his clothing, desperate to grab hold of him and tear him down. He hits Sorrow at that speed, the heat of the flames clinging to his skin. She feels a rib crack under the pressure. His breath is hot and damp and smells like rotting fruit. His voice carries that sickly sweet smell of decay and putrefaction. A corruption of the divine. She knows, past the pain and past the violence, what he truly is. He is the death of all things. Of divinity, of peace, of order. In Remiel, she sees what would cause her ruin. Her head is thrown back as they make contact with the wall behind them, and they keep going. Crashing through decaying and burnt wood, the dust and char fills her lungs. 

They hit the ground together, his sword run through her shirt and the edges of her stomach. A glancing wound. A goring wound. She looks up at him and sees the auburn hue in his eyes shift from gold to green. His teeth are long and sharp like rows of delicate knives. In him, Sorrow sees a wolf. She grimaces in pain and in disgust, hand grasping for her gun she dropped three feet back. It shakes and rattles, like it tries to return to her. 

“Anathema!” She cries out, blood and spit mixing in the back of her throat. “I lay on you anathema!” She tries to spit in his face, but her lips are too dry. 

“You can’t do anything to me Sorrow.” Remiel responds in a voice too sure to be his. “I just fucking hate you.”

His blade twists in the dirt, tearing at Sorrow’s skin and muscle. He thinks she is run through, that she will bleed her last out on that blade. That is why it is curved, that is why his blade mimics the stag’s horns. It is not to resemble his goddess, it is to rip and tear and bleed and break. Sorrow grimaces and winces. She feels his own ichor drip out onto her, staining her shirt and mixing his blood with hers. It feels like acid in the veins, like a cruel burning without heat or warmth. She fears, dear reader. In his eyes, Sorrow sees the same hatred she shown him. Revealed, now. He is sharp, razors keened and honed to an edge. Remiel is a blade now, and nothing else. No longer obscured or hidden behind some litigious grin. In his eyes, she sees oblivion, and she would deserve it. It would be her place.

Sorrow refuses to be that subservient ever again.

She rears back her head and strikes Remiel against the nose with her brow. Ichor and sickening bone-crack splatter from Remiel. It drips into his mouth, frothing with spit and rage already. The pain pulls him back, makes him understand that he is a body with meat and with sense, not a weapon. He reels back, hands dropping his sword and gripping his now broken nose. His bookbag slams against the back of his knees. This is when the pain in his shoulder returns to him. Remiel falls to the floor. Sorrow scrambles backwards, brow now covered in blood and gore. It runs into her eyes, staining her verdant green skin a dark, muddy brown. The blood looks duller now, less real, than it did flowing out of the paladin. Like whatever had imbued it with such purpose left it when it had left Remiel. 

He glared at her, from his place on the floor. From behind his fingers. Dust and ash mixing with his blood, cascading onto his face like a death mask. That visceral disgust might be gone, but not its purpose. She had attacked a member of Isosa’s holy order with no due purpose. Sorrow Brightwind is a threat, as is her Order of Broken Fang. Remiel bites his lip to stifle his moans. A failure. No steps further. He reaches a hand towards her, towards the hilt of his blade.

“Get out of here.” A voice comes from behind Remiel. It is Callan. He is gripping his shoulder, still leaking magmatic blood. His wound is sizzling, steaming from the wound. As if whatever had shot him was still burning. In his other hand, limp at his side, is his sword.“Before I and my friend find it more fun to hunt you.”

“I will burn you all.” Sorrow scrambles backwards, lurching towards the burned out door behind her. “Anathema. I lay on you all Anathema.”

“It wouldn’t be the first.” Callan smiles. “I will be interested to see if, this time, you succeed.”

Somewhere, overhead. A lighting bolt crackles. For the first time in five years, it rains in the Economic District of Mariposa. Between the moment of lighting and thunder. Sorrow is gone. Squirreled away somewhere into the ash and dust. Remiel sighs and begins to sit up, his shoulder tense and swollen. He brings his free hand to the bridge of his nose, feels the pressure of blood coagulating just underneath the skin. It is building. He is himself again. His disgust smoldered out into mere, and infinitely more harmless, anger. Anger, dear reader, anger is actionable. You can understand what angers you. Change either yourself or the world. Disgust only allows you violence, senseless and all encompassing. In disgust, you must destroy what disgusts you. 

Faith in steel.

“Ah, ah.” Callan coos. “Easy, now. Move the wrong way and you might rip something.”

Remiel sighs and keeps his hand pressed tight against his wound. “I’m uh, pretty sturdy.”

“Hells, I can see that.” Callan grins, this time with a genuine smile. His brogue is thick on the tongue. “With how fast you move, I’m quite surprised. Can’t knock you down, can I?”

“Are you going to try to?”

“No, no.” Callan shakes his head. “Something tells me I couldn’t. A gun like that would kill any regular man.”

“You’re, um. Not a wolfkin.” Remiel looks down at the floor, eyes glowered in dejection. “Are you?”

“You’ve been had, I’m afraid. Been the butt of the lark”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought too.”

“Chin up, friend.” Callan sits down on the floor next to Remiel. He twists fire from his wound, drawing it deep from inside of him. Remiel wants to flinch, to run away from such a flame. But, to him, all it feels is warm. “She wore that grin almost as well as I do.”

“I’m uh. Sorry I tried to kill you.”

Callan tuts. “No you didn’t. If what you did to me was trying to kill me, you’d have looked like how you treated the good abbess there.”

“Yeah,” Remiel laughs shallowly, then sucks air in through his teeth. He holds his side tight, clenching some torn muscle used up in whatever magicks Remiel had used to keep himself alive. “Oh, uh. Ow. Don’t- Don’t make me laugh.”

“Noted.” Callan nods. “You did say you needed me for something.”

“I uh.” Remiel removes his hand from his shoulder. The bleeding shouldn’t have stopped yet, Callan thinks. And yet, when he draws his hand back, he is leaking no more. “It's personal business.”

“Far be it from me to pry.” Callan shrugs, reaching into his coat to draw some flask with his good hand. “A man has to keep his own secrets.

There are several moments of silence, as the rain pitters onto the burned out rooftop above them. The wind is not whipping, and the rain is light. A nuisance. Remiel looks over to his companion. “You haven’t talked to Isosa before? Have you?”

Callan blinks twice. “No.”

“Damn.” Remiel sighs as he moves to get up. He winces in pain. Callan looks at the paladin’s shoulder. Healed, already. No more of the sickly sweet ichor that filled Callan’s mind with thoughts of home. His thin, white shirt had been torn open with the bullet, damp with his blood and sticking to his skin. The wound looked closed. Tender, but closed. The flesh around it, however, looked diseased. Thick tendrils of black miasma warped and weaved like roots. Remiel notices Callan’s gaze and moves to cover it with his hand. The pirate looks down at the floor, bashfully.

“You looking for your goddess?” He responds after a slight moment. His own shoulder is not as lucky. The bleeding has stopped, but his arm hangs limp.

“You might not be my target, but that fire doesn’t mean I should trust you.” Remiel mutters. “Sorry.”

“Meant nothing by it, friend.” Callan shrugs with one of his shoulders.

“No, no, eugh.” Remiel pinches the bridge of his nose out of reflex, then flinches away when his hands make contact with the break. “Sorry, I’m just-”

“Worn out?”

“Tired, yeah.”

Callan sits on the floor next to Remiel and starts up his fire, for just a moment. It dances like a friend, flickering shadows cast against the now sodden walls. The fire crackles with moisture and air shimmers with heat, refracting all that is in front of them.

“I’m here, hunting for someone too.” Callan starts back up again. “A witch who’s stolen something from my lady.”

“Not much to go off of.” Remiel shies away from the fire for a moment, his torso turning slightly away, as if a child running from a large dog.

“I’m afraid not.” Callan sighs, his breath shaky. To keep this fire up drains him. But Remiel looks as if he needs the warmth, shuddering in the cold as he is. His grin grows wide, and Remiel does not see. 

“I certainly will not stand in your way.”

Callan knows what to do. 

“When I was younger,” Callan starts, hands held out in front of him, warm in its embrace. “I understood that was all fire was.”

“Hm?”

“Distortion. When fire, true fire, warms, it distorts the air around it. Refracts it in ways that are untrue.” He pauses for a moment. “Fire was guile, it was trickery.”

“Huh.” Remiel leans forward a bit. Was this the first time he’s been close enough to fire to truly see it? The rector was warmed by steam, his home never needed to keep out the cold. The fireplace had always sat empty and whatever food they needed, his mother had always provided. He had heard stories of it, been taught to fear it. But he had never seen it. He moves his hand to his shoulder again, feels the pulse of his heart in his reforming wound. “Fire was destruction. For- for us.”

“Is that right?”

“Fire marks decay, it marks entropy. The breaking of things down from what they were. A transformation.”

“Do you see that right now?”

Remiel pauses for a second. He knows, somewhere, that there is a transfusion here. Part of whoever Callan is was being destroyed in order to create this fire. He could see, if he looked hard enough, the channels of energy along Callan’s veins. He could see the fire burning in his stomach. Consuming him. A wretched thing. A thing of the abyss, of entropy. These are things he can see. 

Trust not your eyes.

Callan can see the fire dancing within them, like a child looking at the stars for the very first time. Remiel’s face is lit up, the shadows grow longer. They are enrapturing, they are obliterating. Upon them, they are the death of all sense. Remiel moves his hands towards them, as if Prometheus grasping for its warmth. Callan’s grin grows just that bit wider, catching the rest of his face ablaze in its glory. A moment, Remiel thinks, a moment could not hurt.

“No.”

[cupoftrembling]

Absence

Apologies for the long delay in correspondence, I've been dealing with traveling and moving to a new country.

The next story, which is up now, is called Lagrange, and its bringing back Elias into the frey.

I will attempt to get the next story online regularly.

Best,

A friend

[cupoftrembling]

Lagrange

There is no word for luck in Mariposian.

Now, of course, there is a word for circumstances outside of one’s control that ends in your benefit, ‘veinard’ I believe it was called. A windfall, being in the right place at the right time. In the proto-Mariposian, which had its roots in the celestial language of the gods, these terms had mostly neutral, or often negative, connotations. One can fall into circumstance, allowing them to come out on top through no action or forethought on their behalf. To earn something not yours, not through force of will or strength or through camaraderie. It was the language one used for finding a crown on the ground. That, had it been anyone else the same situation would have occurred. That it was not due to the specifics of who you are or what you have done. 

And yet, veinard was not how many Mariposian figures are described. Queen Mariposa the Kingbreaker, when her predecessor boarded the boat that would sink during the largest storm that the Askaven Continent had ever seen, was not called veinard. Rosalind Tyra was not a veinard when she won what would become Tyra Logistics in that game of jokers wild. No, they were described in each and every instance as ‘lucky.’ 

Luck. 

A loan word lifted from the eastern dialects of the Confederacy of Eastern Kingdoms. An etymological stopgap that filled a niche in the biosphere of the Mariposian language. The word is, itself, some of the only remaining fae-tongue spoken on the continent still used by the so called mortal races of elf. Scholars argue from which kingdom the word luck was gallicized from. I, personally, believe it was Iji, Mariposa’s closest eastern neighbor, but that is corroborated by nothing but a hunch and blind faith in simple answers. Luck is, perhaps, a misnomer. A mistranslation, as its application within the Mariposian language is more closely akin to the word ‘guile.’ To be lucky is to have schemes and redundancies. To be lucky is to earn what is not yours through skill of mind and sleight of hand. It is to have a grin and a knife behind your back. Every Queen Mariposa had luck in spades, from Litigious to Negligent. The ability to make things the way you wish them to be, with such a skill that, to an uninformed outside observer, it might be mistaken as chance. That only through a close examination of the card up your sleeve or the gun in your hand, such guile might be revealed. 

It makes me wonder; how many Mariposians may be lucky, and I just do not know? Has there been a long string of luck in Mariposa, longer than even history may know about, and perhaps I have just not looked closely enough? Is the veinard who finds the bag of coins dropped simply benefiting from some long laden scheme? What about the cleric who’s rival says the wrong word at the wrong party? What about the winds that brought the Cambion Kings away from the Butterfly Bay, thus saving Queen Mariposa the Kingbreaker from a war in her streets? Was that luck as well? Was the history of Mariposa naught but a long string of wires and webs?

Was it luck that brought Felix Bell Stride to the side of Elias Tvestok?

It is what he wondered as he sat in the Harts of Green that night next to the Vily. The bar was empty, save the two of them and whatever servants manned the establishment. It was a quiet winter's night, with a brutal chill sneaking under the ill fitting door and misaligned window panels. It was a season that Felix had hated. With the whipping winds and it driving men to huddle close to one another next to fire. He was a true Isosian that way, even if he had no faith in the Goddess of Order. The fungal elf looked small in the cool light of the bar, the halogen bulbs reflecting sickly off the birchwood of the walls. Elias was hunched over the countertop, feet dangling from his perch on a too tall stool. 

Next to him, Felix’s bow sat, leaned up against the hardwood counter. It was a massive thing, with quarter-inch copper wire as its bowstring. It dwarfed the Vily it sat next too, thick wychwood ending in burls at either knock. It looked as if it was a young wych elm, cultivated specifically for the purpose of being turned into a bow wholesale. Not hewn, not shaped or carved, but bent in its entirety into a weapon of war. It even still had a few leaves coming from the top, just below the upper nock. The bow looked as if it required a titanic amount of force to draw, too much for any mortal hands and far too much for a man as slender as Felix to draw reliably. 

It was wholly impractical for the modern combat of Mariposa, unwieldy for the streets and corners that his job required him to skulk. But it had been so long by Felix’s side, this weapon of war, that he was loath to let it go. It had been his constant companion, more so than Elias or anyone else in the grand iron cage that was Mariposa. It had its uses too. Hefted over one’s shoulder, the bow could make a formidable weapon. And with a long enough sight-line, with a still enough air, Felix would wrap three fingers around the bowstring. It would whistle as the copper screamed against the still living wood, scraping so hard as to singe and cinder the wych elm. The scent of ozone and soot would fill the air as Felix knocked an arrow. And the wind would sing as his arrow, perfectly straight with no fletching, flown through it.

Felix looked down into his drink sitting in front of him. Something dark green and smelt of wormwood. He glanced over at the copper knife sitting next to it, still sheathed in oryx leather and gold. He had not needed to use his bow today. Somewhere behind the two of them, a spider idly sat on his web. It was the same web it has always made, spun glistening in the flickering halogen lights of the bar. It was night now, and the lights were warm and distracting, making the spider almost invisible to all who might look upon it. 

But not the web

It was so intricate that one would be forgiven for thinking it was weaved entirely from metal and light. Its spirals and fractals covered in a hoarfrost of light, reflecting and refracting throughout its many bends and curves. It was wholly entrancing, threatening to distract or distance anyone who dares to look upon it for just that moment too long. 

Felix smiled and sighed in disappointment, bringing the glass to his lips, his eyes glancing and darting between Elias, the bartender, and Elias. He eventually settled upon his dower companion and continued to smile. “Something on your mind?”

Elias’ face dropped further, like a startled child being scolded by his father. His white eyes darted back between his drink and his drinking companion, the wrists of his suit coat tugged slightly, as if it was not properly tailored for him. A growth spurt during his service to the Rumor Queen. “What are we doing here, Felix?” He finally muttered, running a long nail across the rim of his glass. It was something weaker than what Felix had ordered. Elias always ordered the same drink whenever the two of them went out. Krum’s Rot, an orcish rye whisky  But he would maybe drink two sips of it before they had retired for the night. I think Elias just hated how it tasted, like bile and sweetness.

“You did a good job.” Felix answered, uninterested in whatever game the rich kid wanted to play. “And so you got paid for it. The Rumor Queen might have her schemes, but ours are surprisingly not that complex.”

Elias sighed, putting his hand on his forehead, thumb rubbing the edge of his temple. He avoids eye contact with the barkeep, a young human with short cropped brown hair. Around his neck and pierced in his ears are golden effigies of a stag’s fang. “It was a fucking babysitting job.”

“It was not a babysitting job, Elias.” Felix rolled his eyes, raising his mug of something warm and spiced to his own lips. Elias was hunched over the countertop now, elbows digging harshly into the poplar. Felix’s shoulders were straight, his back arched just slightly against the backrest of the uncomfortable barstool. Behind them, the front door creaks, announcing the arrival of another would-be patron. Felix spots her from the corner of his eye, his head not turning in the slightest. Her horns poke out from beneath her hat. A cambion, perhaps. Certainly bestial.

He wonders if Elias sees her.

“That’s what Alace called it!” The lawyer blubbers, as if he was already drunk. 

“I don’t think-” Felix begins.

“Witch-boss wants ya.” Elias interrupts with perhaps his most unflattering impression of the halfling. He looks up at Felix, his face contorted into a gross sneer. For a moment, Felix almost found it charming. Instead, he smiled into his still warm mug. Elias continues, nose scrunching in mock disgust. “Gotta have the lady’s best babysitter on it.”

“I was there, Elias.” The archer brings his drink back down against the countertop. “And he didn’t say exactly that it was babysitting. And you did do a good job.”

“I sat on a rooftop all night and watched over a warehouse for six hours.”

There is some commotion behind the two of them as another patron, one who must have just entered, pulls a stool out next to the cambion woman. She still was not within proper sightline of Felix, hiding in that spot right between his skull and his eyes. Her presence was still felt, however. Like a hand ghosting over his shoulder, he could feel her there burning like an absent flame. He could see the man, a gray orc from the looks of it, sitting next to her however. He was tall and uncomfortably sitting on one of the stools. Felix motions the bartender for another drink.

“You truly do think so highly of yourself, Elias.” Felix leaned forward on the counter, the rough and unsanded wood digging into his forearms. “Where are we going with this?”

Elias sighed and rubbed his temples. He took, for the first time that night, a sip of his whisky. He made a face, almost instinctively and certainly absentmindedly. “When did Mab hire you?”

Felix’s face did not move, although he did lean closer. “Where are we going with this?” He repeats himself, albeit quieter. He did not want to ask the question again.

“When she hired me, she sought me out.” Elias looked down into his orcish whisky. His reflection seemed to pale in comparison to what he thought he might look like. Maybe a bit longer hair, maybe a bit less pathetic. He wondered if that is how Felix saw him and, for a moment, fought the urge to smile. He ran a hand through his hyphae and looked back up at his companion. “She looked for me, sent me a missive. I was sitting in a cafe, late at night, when a courier brought me one of her letters. Red stamp, fine stationery, the whole deal. She summoned me, called for me. I must have been special enough for that.”

Felix sighed again and straightened up from his position. The bartender placed the drink in front of him with a loud clatter, startling the lawyer beside him. Felix looked up at the bartender’s face. He wasn’t looking at his customer in front of him, he wasn’t looking at Elias or Felix. He was looking at the woman behind the two of them, Felix could see her in the reflection of the bartender’s eyes. Her hat was off now, although through the glassy cornea all other descriptions were obscured. The man in front of them had not gone to serve them at any point since the two lawyers had entered the Hart of Green. And, as such, there were seemingly no drinks in front of them.

The bartender’s eyes shot down towards Felix. An instinct, to watch what was watching you. I am not even sure he knew that he was being observed. They were bloodshot, the bartender’s eyes. Like they had not rested in days. Felix raised the glass to his lips again and, absentmindedly, grabbed the knife on the counter. He was sure no one in the bar had seen him do it, not even Elias. He fought the urge to even look at the Vily besides him. ‘This must be why.’ Felix thought to himself, ‘Our lady didn’t seem to trust you with better jobs.’

Felix did not break eye contact with the bartender. Behind him, the spider wound a strung so taught I was scared it might break.

“She found me, half drunk on vengeance in a glen somewhere off the coast of the Eastern Kingdoms.” He finally responded after a second too long. The bartender looked away, to be busy somewhere else. Felix’s lips curled into a smile. The boy may not understand what the archer is doing, but the bartender did. “Offered me a place within her organization. I guess I was hungry.”

Elias looked up at him, eyebrows raised in an unreadable mixture of emotions. “Half drunk on vengeance?” 

“I made a promise a long time ago.” Felix looked over to his bow, its nock curving like a lyre. The man whose hand had hewn it rested on Felix’s chin. His fingers, supple and spindly, lay against his neck, at the vulnerable point where his jaw met his throat. An arrow knocked, whistling like music as it flew through the air. His arm brought back in recurve as his fingers, three of them, ran along the bow’s one, beautiful string. A weapon of war, beat from some beautiful music. Felix looked back from his memory, now towards the Vily, who was studying the archer’s face with grand consideration. Elias noticed that Felix was now back in the room with him and, quickly, returned to his glass. From behind the two of them, the woman rose from her stool but did not move. “I wasn’t quite done when Mab found me.” Felix continued. “But, ah, such are the follies of younger men.”

“I’m… not sure I’ve ever been there.” Elias muttered to himself in a moment of pure empathy. “So deep in vengeance, I mean. What was it like?”

Felix took a deep breath and did not close his eyes. “You’re good at getting beneath the armor, aren’t you Elias?”

Elias smiled weakly. The door behind them opened again. Felix looked over at the countertop across the bartender and saw the bell that hung above it, broken off. The door shut. Three and four. Another cambion and human. One, the human I believe, had a shotgun with a little charm on the end of it. Another stag’s tooth. Felix fights the urge to turn around. He believes they have come for him, and he would not give them the satisfaction of looking their prey in the eyes. 

“I am good at my job, Felix.” Elias sat up straight for the first time since entering the bar. Did he not see the men behind him? “It’s why Mab hired me.”

Felix looked back at the bartender, their eyes met. After a long pause, Felix answered the Vily’s question. “It poured from the mouth like wine, like a cup overfilled and trembling.” He looked back at Elias. “It was all you could taste, like ash. It was like drowning in ash. Keened your senses into razors and sharpened you into something beautiful.”

“Beautiful?” The bartender interrupted. In his hand was an already clean glass. He glanced back behind Felix, as if the outburst startled someone.

“Beautiful.” Felix continued, furrowing his brow. “I chose the right word.”

Elias quirked an eyebrow. “Then why only half drunk?”

“Because I didn’t give myself to it, not fully.” Felix turned his head, just slightly, to the woman behind him. She took a step forward in acknowledgement. Elias did not follow his eyeline. “That was my mistake. Either do not start or finish it, Elias. Half of a transformation is misery.”

“Sounds lucky that she found you then.” Elias ran his hand along the rim of the glass. 

Felix sneered, disgusted. “I abhor luck, Schemes and warding winter winds. It’s the one thing I hate about your employer, the one thing unbecoming of her station.”

“My employer?” Elias put his hand on his chest in mock aghast.

“Marabell Dayshaper may be your employer, she is my Lady.” Felix rejoins

Behind the two of them is another step. Trepidacous, heavy, and not joined by her companions Felix notices. If the cambion wasn’t so duplicitous, so lucky herself, he would admire her gall.

Elias smiled and turned away from Felix, now facing the bartender. “You sound like the old man.”

Felix also turned towards the human in front of them. Felix is staring at the bartender’s hands. They are worn red, as if they have been scrubbed repeatedly and obsessively. His fingernails were bit back to the stub. “You have a lot to learn from Bernard.”

“Not you?”

“I’m sure I do.” Felix leans back somewhat. He can feel the gun against the nape of his neck, it's cold iron burning against his sinewy skin. Who were they? What grand scheme had Felix Bell Stride fallen for this time. And the kid, Felix glared at him. Would he run? Hide? He oversaw him, Lady’s orders. Several missions, he was clumsy and aimless. Felix was sure the boy was a coward. Even now, he didn’t notice how in much danger they actually were. “But I’ve lived a bit longer than you, Elias Tvestok. And I worry my learning days are far beyond me.”

Elias sat up in a way that Felix saw as mimicry. “Do you regret this?” Behind them, the strand snapped, an errant and cruel wind unmoored the spider.

Another step. She would be on him in a moment. There was a door towards the back of the establishment. Perhaps it went to the kitchen, perhaps it went to some sort of back alley. But it was an escape. He could make it, but Felix would be unable to take both the boy and his bow that sat besides him. He, for a moment he did not have, debated which one to leave behind, stuck between two decisions. 

If Felix could sweat, if the salt could stain his clothing, I don’t think he would have in this moment. It makes him proud to think that. His composure. That came with his position in Mab’s organization. He would have been disgusted in himself if he had broken now. He was unsure of what the boy meant, which part would have he regretted? The vengeance? The schemes, the wires? For the first time in Felix’s life, he felt the desire to lie, to twist some cruel words together in untruth. Although why, I am not sure. 

It is anathema to him. He is a creature of truth, only as good as his word. Another step behind him. He can feel her now, he doesn’t even have to turn around to face his killer. 

“How could I ever?” Felix responds, turning his head towards Elias with a smile. A hammer clicks behind the two of them. Felix’s eyes dilate. The gun is placed to the back of Elias’ neck.

A green hand wrapped around the pistol’s grip. Her hold. Tight enough to draw blood. It smells like niter. Like soot. From its pommel, a small golden stag’s tooth hangs. His heart pounds. A glint of smile from the assailant. Rage drips from between the gaps of her teeth. He can see it. In her eyes. He wasn’t the target.

Felix reaches for the knife.

He is not fast enough.

The room fills with a green flash. Sparks fly, searing phosphorus onto Felix’s eyes. There are stars, bright white spots where the absent flame burns. The ash he smelt the moments before burn his nose. His knife swings around, drawn from its sheath. The boy is thrown forward by the force. His chest hits the countertop. White, fleshy hyphae and cerebral fluid splatter across the poplar wood. Elias slumps over, head hitting the countertop. His body hits the ground like a dead dog. His foot kicks, twitches, trying to find purchase. The projectile went clean through him. Tearing white blood and flesh apart with grand force. The wood beneath him splintered. Singed. Elias’ white blood makes it look like a smoldering fire. 

Felix dares not look down. His knife is braced in front of him. The blade catches the light like an absent flame. There are four of them. Five now, with the bartender. The orc has stepped in front of the door. Behind Felix there is the man with the shotgun, next to the other cambion who appears unarmed. The bartender has drawn a gun.

And the woman in front of him stands there. Her barrel is still smoking. The front of the weapon is completely caked in Elias, dripping white blood onto the floor. Onto her boots. He can see her now. She is still turned towards the corpse, not paying any attention to Felix or his drawn weapon. Her skin is verdant and green, starkly contrasting with the white blood on her hands, like she had washed her hands in him.

The woman did not strike an imposing figure. She was shorter than Felix by a couple heads. Her cheeks were gaunt like she had been starved for some time. Her eyes were red and tears were streaming down her cheek. The gun sat trembling in her hands. She lowered the gun, leveling it with Elias’ corpse.

“Who are-” Felix is interrupted by another white flash. She fires again into his still body. His body crumples around the force of the weapon. It smells like burning. And then another, the woman’s shoulder barely recoiling with each round fired, as if she had become a part of that baleful weapon. Felix flinches with each shot, four in total, and drops lower in his stance, pulling the knife in front of him.

“I’m the one holding the gun.” The woman responds, her eyes still locked on Elias’ body. She waits for him to stop twitching, to stop moving. She closes her eyes for a moment and, then, turns towards Felix. “I think that means I get to ask the questions.” Her voice is colder, more distant. Like speaking through a phone.

Felix fights the urge to look at Elias again. Instead, he glances again at the bartender. “Do you know who he worked for?”

The woman nods and speaks for him. “I do.”

“So, you know the trouble you’ve placed yourself in.”

The woman smiles, cheeks still stained with her sublimating tears. “I do.”

“Even if you kill me, you won’t get very far.”

“He was personal.” The woman lowers her gun now, finger still poised over the trigger. He knows, somewhere on the nape of his neck, that if he were to make a move, she could move faster than he could. It is in her eyes. Half drunk on vengeance. An absent flame. “An itch that needed to be scratched. You’re of use to me.”

Felix raised an eyebrow and his voice. “The boy?” He glanced back at the bartender behind him. “What, did he take your candy too? Knock you over on the swings? All of you?” None of the other conspirators looked at Felix. Nor at the corpse laying on the floor, at the exhibition of hatred before them.

“I guess I just have my vices, Felix.” The woman turned towards him, motioning with the pistol. It was alluring, it was more real than the woman holding it, caught the light more convincingly than her. “Should I make one of you?”

“I didn’t think vengeance was a vice of Isosa.” Felix motioned to the chain hanging from the pommel of her gun.

“Neither is indulgence.” She took a step forward, still limply carrying the gun in her hands. “But putting either above duty? But un-vigilance? A vice so low that we don’t even have a word for it.” She smiles in a way she thinks is meek. It was a mouth full of razors. “But I am no paladin, no priest.”

“How low they would think of you.”

The cambion continues to smile. A single bead of sweat rolls down the forehead of the bartender to the side of her. He eyes her wildly. The orc between Felix and the door has his finger over the trigger, shotgun leveled at the space between the two of them. “I am Sorrow Brightwind, and this is my Order of Broken Fang.”

A look was shared between her companions, one that neither Felix, nor by extension me, could decipher. A mix of rage, a tinge of obedience. Felix scoffed. “I have no interest in your sectarian violence. Nor did my companion.”

“Your employer certainly has an affinity for it.”

Felix bared his teeth. Sorrow's hands tightened around her gun. “This doesn’t seem like the crowd for you, miss.”

Sorrow places a hand on the bar counter. “Should I be in some cloister somewhere?”

“You are the one who said it.”

“I chose another path.” Sorrow gripped the countertop, teeth clenching together. Next to her, Felix’s bow, hewn from vengeance much like her. “No more no less.”

“It takes a stronger person than you to choose vengeance, to choose rage.” Felix looked at his bow as well and closed his eyes. He could hear its whistling, its purpose as a tool for violence. It, itself, was not violent in nature. It was a thing of beauty, of no will of its own. “For people like you, it is a gift, something given to you by someone stronger. Something you take in your hands, not something you make.”

Sorrow looked towards Felix’s bow. “People like us, Felix.”

“People like us.” Felix’s eyes shot away from the two of them, the bow and Sorrow, now eying a bottle of Krum’s Rot. There is a moment, and only a moment, dear reader, he could not hear his bow’s constant, droning whistle. For a moment, he feels as if he could walk out of this city. For a moment, he could walk into the sunset. 

And then the whistling creeps back in. 

It crawls in up his shoulder, wraps and weaves its way around his neck and the thought, the word of freedom, dies in his throat. It died right behind his teeth, its corpse now nestled where his tongue should have been. Where he should have had the words to bite Sorrow with. Where he could have had the courage to look down at his feet, at the blood pooling against his shoes. Ah, how distant that corpse had seemed. Elias’ blood ran cold against the leather of Felix’s boots. How he tried to ignore it. How indeed, dear reader.

Felix looked down, for just a moment, and all he saw was meat. 

Felix looked back up at Sorrow, at her white spattered hands, still dripping just slightly. “What do you want from me? What peace do you think I can give you?”

Sorrow looked down at her shoes, methodically thumbing the trigger of her gun. She, too, averted her gaze from the corpse below her for reasons that still escape me. Was it shame? Discomfort? Sorrow had killed once before, three nights before this one. In the dark alleyways of the ruins of the Economic District where the transient and wolfkin lay. Even before then, Isosian thought predicates violence. It is, itself, a cutting knife, carving away pieces of reality to best fit the Grand Weft of their patron god. Sorrow holds it in her hand, cut away the parts of her that made her un-vigilant.

Had she failed by refusing to look at her kill? 

“I have not cut away enough.”

Her finger finds the trigger of her gun, but she does not pull it yet. Felix grips his blade just that little bit tighter. “And you would see me the knife.”

“Your friend here, he has- had- taken something from me. Something on behalf of your employer.” Sorrow walked towards the door, not to exit but to give space for her words. Let them sit in the room between the two of them.

“I’m sure you’ve been following other members, other people who could give you the information you need.” Felix took a step forward, still brandishing that bronze knife in his hands. Beneath him, Elias’ foot trembled. Sorrow reached for his hand, not in malice, not in compassion, but out of pure and fitful instinct. And Felix lets her. He lets her put her palm against his blade. The room fills with the smell of blood. There is a moment that passes, where Sorrow’s companions are unsure of who to shoot, where they just stand there. Sorrow smiles what she thinks is a meek smile, a passive smile. 

It was full of teeth.

“None of them were as hungry as you are.”

And that is when the room ignites with absent flame.

The door behind them explodes into splinters, knocking one of Sorrow’s men to his knees. Wooden shards flitter and fly throughout the room, with one large one striking Felix against his brow, splattering green ichor against the bar. Felix barely has a moment to turn and look at the door breaking apart, barely a second to register who was standing amongst the smoldering ruin that was the door. She was tall, at least as tall as Felix was. With gray, almost ashen hair tied close in some sort of braid behind her head. Her pointed ears and equally gray skin stood out against her imperial garb, with its black fabric and green tint. Her epaulettes demarcated her as some sort of officer. In her hand, a wrought iron rapier, with a pappenheim hilt. It was black and hummed slightly with the song on the elf’s lips.

It was someone who Felix recognized immediately. Anyone in Mariposa knew of the Butcher of Blackvien and Conqueror of Karnata. The woman who stood head to head with the might of the Grand Butterfly and came out victorious. In her hand, a feykiller, this Felix was certain of. A iron weapon, cold steel that was anathema to those from the wyld. She was the only elven officer among the Empire of Night forces in Mariposa. She was tall, and razor thin, with one hand behind her back and her sword was held just before her nose. 

She was Brigadier Delilah Nirdeh. 

Did she know who was supposed to be here? Behind her, shouting instructions and curses, soldiers. It could have been the entire Empire for all Felix might have known. They came from the night, pushing past their brigadier as if she was as razor thin as her song. They began to flood the Harts of Green, with weapons of war keened. Felix was not able to see their faces behind their masks, frozen as he was. But he could see the steam escape from where their mouths would be, see their eyes dart from the slits in their helmets. He could see the cold iron rifles they held between their plump fingers. 

Felix began to raise his knife but he found he couldn’t. For a moment, he blamed his nerves, that his old age and sentimentality has slowed him, gut him somehow. Sorrow seemingly did not notice his hesitation, merely keeping an eye on Felix himself. The archer broke the gaze first, glancing down at his knife to only see a third hand grasping around the blade. The grip was weak, but it is still there. Its fingers wrap themselves around the cross hilt, with half of them on the blade and half of them on the grip. Felix looks down in shock as Sorrow’s companions begin to open fire on the imperial intruders to see that the fingers were blue. Elias looked up at the blade between Sorrow and Felix, now half grasped in his hands. His head split open by the shot, fleshy hyphae singed by the absolute terror of Sorrow’s violence. Felix could see clear through his head to the gore stained bar floor beneath them. Already, the strands of Elias were reforming, attempting to close the wound that was once his eye. But it was a careful process, a laborious process. And on Elias’s face, plastered just below where his skin split and splattered with viscera and gore, there was a knowing and hungry smile. His hand gripped the blade tighter, so hard that, for but a moment, Felix thought the boy was about to break the blade.

There was none of the bumbling, none of the whimpering and sobbing that he acquainted with Elias. Only a sharpness, it was behind his one good eye. It was hidden behind his flashing bioluminescence, which was now dulled and empty. His eye lacked focus. Or perhaps, it was focused on simply everything, taking in every single stimuli at once.  Felix wondered in the moment between moments, how this coward got so lucky?

And then, behind them, sat the spider. 

It lay in yet another web, caught in its own contingency. The glisten of this secondary web was even fainter, even daintier. It was a more advantageous, more strategic position than its original webbing ever had been, shadowed by the vast and obvious net it weaved just above it, obscured in shadow. And among its gossamer thin strands, were just so many flies, each unaware of the threads they were stranded in, tugging and pulling against forces they, themselves, could not understand. They had thought they had avoided the web by flying below the first one. They wound themselves tighter with each struggle against the web. Felix could feel it now, even though the whole night he sat unaware of its prying eyes. 

He swears he could feel the thing smile.

And Felix finally understood. He hated how much it made him want to smile back.

Elias grabbed the handle of the knife with a strength not yet seen by his companion, sliding its blade along Sorrow’s hand and driving it deep into her tender and soft thigh. That smell of blood, acrid and metallic, was gone with Sorrow’s separation from the knife, mooring Felix back to the real, back to his understanding of the world. The glimpse of the spider was gone, even if he still knew, somewhere, that he was still there. 

She did not scream when the blade pierced her thigh, did not react in any way typical of a scared housewife or mother. A bullet whizzed past her ear, cutting a strand of her hair that had dared move out of place. It was as if the bullets were haloed around her, as if the guns could fire at anything but her, and that hair had simply forgotten its place in this. The bartender, still fumbling with his shotgun, takes a round to the chin, sending him limp and reeling against the shelf behind him. The clattering of bottles, the dripping ichor of them, spill against the floor. He had no such assurity as Sorrow, no such confidence in her well being. 

Sorrow reeled back, fist clenching in absent flame, her blood dripping from between her clenched fingers. Her body twists, contorts in ugly shape. Her shoulder looks as if it might break, her muscles are pulled taught against her skin, her skin flay at the edges of her. It comes away just where her fingernails, grime covered and soaked in now drying and sublimating blood, meet her skin in strips. In that very moment, Elias reaches for the gun in his breast pocket with a precision that Felix has never seen. There is no fumbling for the handle, no fingers getting caught on latches or cloth. Felix could almost see them micrometers of adjustment that was happening in the errant twitch of the boy’s fingers. It was as if he was made for this, it was as if all the cowardice faded away, washed away in gore and violence. 

It was at that moment, when Elias reached for his gun and Sorrow was mere inches away from behind upon him, that is when Felix began to run. Nirdeh would be on them in a moment, Felix knew that. He did not know how, or why, he knew that. Maybe it was in how she let the others flow around her, like she could give them the first taste of whatever was happening here. Felix grabbed his bow from beside the counter, still desperate for some kind of violence. As he rounded the bar, as his hand graced the wood of the counter, he turned his head to look back at Sorrow and Elias. His bow drawn, arrow knocked in a moment of pure motion and instinct.

She had her thumbs wrapped around the hole she had made in his skull and at the corner of his eyes. Her teeth were barred, her mouth exhaled vengeance. Her brow was contorted and twisted into a mix of cruel glee and drunken fervor. White viscera pooled from the re-opening wound. Her fingers, adorned with talons and claws, cut at his skin. 

Elias had drawn his revolver. It was a cold black thing that always made Felix shudder to think of. His hand was perfectly, calculatingly exact. He could still see the movements, subtle adjustments that Felix only now realized what they were. They were not tremors, they were decisions. He was flitting between which part of her to shoot.

Nirdeh was behind them. Her sword was drawn and swept back. Her gloved hand reached towards Sorrow. Flecks of white blood splatter against the dark gray leather of her uniform. She grips her rapier even tighter. Flecks of song fall from it like rime ice.

All three of them were smiling.

Felix did not know which one to shoot.

He turned around just as a gun’s hammer found its place, as the round fired off. He flies through the door and into the cold, raining night. Elias had just pulled the trigger on his pistol, just squeezed his hand as its barrel was over her kidney. Sorrow’s hand withdrew during its ego pause, in between the moments between action and reaction. The hammer clicked, Elias wished to kill, and then the room was filled with smoke. The E-99 Oscillating Revolver, even this model that Elias had designed himself, had just as much recoil as his workhorse rifle. Elias’ elbow was braced against his stomach and was kicked into it, knocking the wind from the young Vily. His eyes still snapped shut. He had expected a yell, had expected to feel the dripping viscera onto him, he had expected Sorrow to crumble. 

As his vision sharpened, as Elias blinked away the blood, he did not expect to only see Brigadier Delilah Nirdeh. Her long coat blew from the shattered door behind her, with subtle rain plittering down against the old hardwood floor. Her cloak was tattered and torn, singed slightly by the round that Elias let loose. The barrel of his revolver was still smoking. His other elbow was dug into the hardwood as he propped himself up. He turned around, twisting at the waist. Behind him, another open door, this time slamming against the door frame in the whipping wind. Beyond that door, Sorrow was running. A verdant green spot mixing in with the steel, industrial gray of Mariposa in the rain. She was gone, Elias knew this. There would never be a moment where she would so fittingly fall for his trap.

“A keener woman would think you shot at me.” Delilah Nirdeh stood above Elias, her backswept hilt turned towards him, point of her singing sword straight down.

Elias raised his wrist holding his gun up to his nose, wiping away some of his mycelial fluid. It was not blood, as most who were not Vily thought it was, but latex. The Vily form had no need for coagulants, and each cell of their body acted as an ersatz synapse, an isolated and specialized organism that made up the hive-mind that was the sprouting Vily. The mycelial fluid was a deterrent for predation. It made Brigadier Nideh’s nose crinkle in irritation. It flowed from his wounds with no sign of stopping, pooling over her boots and stained her leather so deep that she would never, truly, get it out. 

“How keened are you?” Elias spat out between teeth in a venom that was neither intended nor necessary for the situation. Delilah scowled and extended an arm out.

“You aren’t the prickliest Fleur agent that I’ve met.” She shook her own hand, as if he were a dog and it was an enticing bone that Elias had yet to pick up the scent. “Suppose that counts for something.”

“I suppose I should thank you.” Elias responded, grabbing her forearm in a sort of greeting. “You did save my life.”

Delilah smiled, hoisting the Vily off of the floor. Her forearm was toned, her muscles almost seemed to writhe under his touch, as if she was bristling under his touch. Perhaps it wasn’t something the young brigadier felt all that often. “You seemed to have it handled, sir.” 

Elias stood up, with the brigadier’s help of course, and shook the dust and grime from off his lapel. “I am never going to get this out of my coat.” He looked at the hem of his sleeve, the one that once held the knife. It was splattered with blood, true blood, real blood. Green, verdant blood. He stared at the ichor for a moment that was just too long. Below his hand, the knife sat on the floor, reverberating, harmonizing even, with the song that was still coming from Nirdeh’s lips. 

Delilah looked back towards the flapping door and gripped her sword a hair tighter. “They your friends?”

“Tall one is.” Elias glances to his side. He knew that she would chase someone, could see it in her eyes. That same, starved look that Sorrow had. She needed a hunt. “I’d prefer to keep him intact if it's all the same to you.”

The brigadier nodded and turned around towards her men. “We’re looking for a green Cambion, woman. Ran away from an active crime scene.” As if the soldiers were a part of her, some fruiting body, they filtered out of the bar, leaving only Elias, Nirdeh, and the corpses.

Elias survailed the scene. Not his best work, he thought. A bit sloppy. He glanced down at the bronze knife, Felix’s prized possession. He knelt down and grabbed it. He had gotten what he wanted. “I take it you’re stuck behind a desk too much.”

Nirdeh sighed. “That is evidence, you know. In your assault.”

“You’re dodging the question.” Elias smiled, pocketing the sticky blade in his coat.

“The 81st doesn’t stay in one place for too long. We often leave the actual governing to the auxiliary forces.” She scowled. When the 81st Legion took Karnata, Nirdeh did not stay long enough to see what she had left behind. Nine different legal, judicial, and political legions filtered in to replace the bureaucracy that she slaughtered invading the nation, three times as many as was normal or necessary.

“Bang up job you’re doing here.”

“I’m a soldier.” Nirdeh glanced over to the Vily. “I usually don’t work in law enforcement.”

“What do they have you out here for then?” Elias continued, rummaging around his own gore on the floor for something. Hidden behind the viscera, his torn ear. Inside it, a crystalline bullet. Cracked, leaking entropy, but still working.

“It was my round.”

Elias looked up at her incredulously. “Officers have to take the beat?”

“We were responding to a concerned citizen, Mr. Tvestok.” Nirdeh responded. “Someone said his brother was in here.”

Elias sighed, standing up from his crouched position. His head and ribs should hurt more than they do, should be sharp and warm. He held the bullet in his hand as it began to ring. He did not pick it up. “How patriotic.”

Nirdeh grabbed his shoulder, tight glove digging into the fabric of his suit. They were alone now, even the patter of rain outside seemed to cease. “Should I be worried about a Fleur agent operating so boldly in my city?”

Elias looked over his shoulder with his good eye, head lolling to one side. “Maximillian signed the armistice with us, made us the governing body.” Elias smiled. “If anything, it's our city.”

“The General bought out your contracts from the Corporate Lords so that you may serve in our best interest.” Nirdeh rejoined with a bit more venom than I think she intended.

“Ipso facto anything I do is in your best interest.” Elias continued to smile, his teeth as white as spider webs. “There’s no need for him to sick his hunting dog on me.”

Nirdeh let go of his shoulder and sighed. “I trust you, Mr. Tvestok. I’d simply be remiss if I didn’t ask.”

The Vily raised an eyebrow in shock, unsure of what truly to say. “I.” He paused, the words dying in his throat. He turned around to face her, she stood a good head taller than Elias. Her face was all sharp angles, much like his. “Thank you, Delilah.”

Nirdeh turned around, towards the door her prey absconded from. “Do not make me regret that.” And, into the night, she was gone, the bullet in his hand still ringing, echoing throughout the now empty bar.. Elias turned away, turned towards the shattered door. He saw, in the rain, a single, purple Vily underneath a street light. He held up a black umbrella and was adorned in a black, tight suit, much like Elias’. He held his hand up to his ear. The bullet in Elias’ hand rings again, this time a bit louder.

He affixed the bullet into his one good ear and tuned it into his brother’s frequency.

“Was it a good sortie?” The smug voice asked him, words cutting and cruel.

“A good evening to you as well, Quincy.” Elias sighed, pinching the bridge of what remained of his nose.

“What have I, what has Dad, told you about going in half cocked?” The figure gesticulates from across the way. This was the only way they could talk, with the distance between them.

“I got results.”

“Oh?” Quincy responds flippantly. “And what result is that? You getting your face blown off?”

“Consider it setting tolerances.” Elias rejoined. “Or, maybe it's better saying that I was setting operational boundaries, if you wanted something that would sound like it came from you.” He turned towards the bar, towards the corpses. Each stamped with an Imperial Mark, a bullet hole in their backs and in their heads. All kill shots. The Empire had no need for the rank in file, so they took none in. “Now I know what these people think of me.”

“You organized your own hit.” Quincy talks with a deliberate cadence, words each implying their own malice. “So you could find out if that boy likes you?”

“You make it sound so juvenile.”

“Is that not what you did?”

“I had to know what he knew of me. Had to know why she was following me.”

There was a break, a pause in conversation. Short as a breath. “You knew Sorrow was following you?”

Elias’ shot a look back at the figure across the street. Above him, the street light flickered. “A friend of yours?”

“I ran into her on another operation.” Quincy mumbled out, shifting in place somewhat. Elias narrowed his eyes. “At Rae Courtyard.”

“She’s that little devil?”

“The very same.”

“So you got me shot.” Elias began to laugh, a choked chuckle cut off by the pain of his mangled face. “I don’t know why you hide such things from me if I’m just going to find them out anyway.”

“Did not.”

“Good thing she didn’t know how resilient us Vily are. Otherwise I might not be walking right now.”

A sigh broke over the radio wave. “I won’t always be around to scrape you off of the floor, Elias.”

Elias looked back down at the corpses and their Imperial marks. He almost muttered out some sort of prayer, some sort of guiding word for their soul. He fought the urge. “You were here rather fast, weren’t you, Quincy.”

Another beat. “I was in the area.”

Elias smiled. Behind him, the spider sat in its hidden web. It's belly full and brimming with squirming flies. A smile, content and proud, plastered across its mandibles. Elias shot Quincy that same smile from across the street, so wide now it might as well have been continents away. Quincy did not know what he saw, or what Elias was thinking, but it made him squirm in his boots all the same. Like a predator late for a hunt.

“I am sure you were.”

[cupoftrembling]

Thanks @glassbeakers for letting me paint your gorgeous boy, Remiel. <3

Also one of the main characters in the webseries, @cupoftrembling, which if you want to know more about this guy and what his deal is, you should check out and read some of Madeline's fantastic writing.

[cupoftrembling]

The first thing Vera noticed was the flies.

Mariposa was not a particularly humid city, despite what its place on the coast of the Screaming Seas might lead you to believe. It was often cooler, even into the summertime, with wafting breeze coming from across the rocks on the Butterfly Bay. In fact, it is that cool breeze that allowed the city to become something of a mercantile hub, with the tradewinds stretching far across the continent, from the Coalition of Eastern Regencies to the Empire of Night. The air does not stick to the lungs, sweat does not coat the back of your head when you toil.

And yet, there the flies were. In the sticky, sweet air in Manor Tyra, just in the corner of the room, she saw them buzzing around a vent in the wall, flying in and out of the metal opening. They almost seem to dance, their humming almost melodic in its grating. They disperse across the room as they leave the air vent, maybe three, maybe four. One lands on a blood red chrysanthemum, one lands right on the cheek of the large painting of Rosalind Tyra, one lands on the brow of the head butler.

“Why do you want this position, Miss Hershal?” The head butler asks. If he notices it, if his brow twitching is in response to the little bug, Vera does not know. She did not quite get his name, with the introductions having been drowned out by the flies' incessant din. 

Vera responds, but not in any way she can really articulate. Something about dreams, as if every moment in Vera’s life was leading to her dusting and cooking. The buzzing of the flies has turned musical almost, as if their wings were harmonizing with the dust in the air, in the oscillation of the light coming from dim bulbs, in the growl of her stomach. Work was hard to find in Mariposa, but the corporate lords pay well.

The head butler coughs again, this time with less politeness and more hoarse. It is stern enough to bring Vera back to herself, as if he knew she was somewhere else. “So, Miss Hershal.”

Vera looks back towards the butler, still straining one ear to listen to the buzzing. “Please, Vera is alright I think.”

Behind the head butler, Rosalind’s daughter taps her finger just once. Enough to be almost imperceptible, save for the fact that she had not moved this whole conversation. The head butler scowles just slightly. “We prize objectivity here, Miss Vera. We may be a family, but we need to keep things courteous.”

Vera nods, a slight, warm and red blush creeps across the bridge of her nose. “Oh, then yea, um. Miss Hershal works.”

Rosalind’s daughter smiles. Besides her foot is a hunter’s ax. It leans against her leather boot. And even at this distance, Vera smells something of ash. The head butler continues. “Out of all the applicants, you’ve been selected for Rosalind’s personal aide. You must feel honored.”

Vera nods. “Oh yes! Very, very.” Her voice is dripping with faux sincerity.

“Technically, you’re the personal aide for the Tyra family as well.” The head butler rejoined. “Including Crimson, here. You serve at their pleasure. Tyra Logistics and Transportation welcomes you.”

The woman behind the head butler smiles and raises a single finger in recognition. Her grin is plastered in red rouge. She opens her mouth to say something, her teeth are pearlescent, almost clear. A single smudge of the lipstick marks her canine. “Charles.” Her voice is soft, lacking in any of the formality that the head butler prided himself in. “I might be getting ahead of myself, but-”

Vera’s face dropped, her hands fidgeted in her lap. The fabric of her dress was threadbare and hand hewn, her boots, which were still tapping on the ground in tune with the fragrant buzzing, were had nails driven through the sole. “A-Ahead of yourself?” Vera manages to get out. She brings her hands to her mouth in shock at the interruption. Tyra smiles.

“Really, Miss Tyra?” The head butler nods, refusing to look over his shoulder at the corporate lord behind him. 

“Oh of course I’m sure.” Crimson rejoins. She looks back towards Vera. “I think I’m ready to welcome you to the family, my attendant.”

Vera looks back at the woman. Crimson’s face is unreadable. It has a smile on it, and narrow eyes. But no actual emotion is anywhere to be found. She reaches over to her discarded glass of wine on the end table beside her. It is red and full bodied. One of the flies has landed on the surface, struggling to break the surface tension. Tyra brings the glass to her lips as the fly thrashes, as if she does not notice. A single drop of the bordeaux lands on her cheek. Her skin is like cotton, it absorbs the wine just as fast. 

“There are, of course, responsibilities to the task.” The head butler rejoins. Crimson brings the wine glass just below her lips. The fly has stopped thrashing. Its buzz still rings, maybe even a bit louder. “An important position such as this can’t just go to anyone.”

“If you don’t mind me being so bold.” Vera asks, fighting back a smug smile. “If it's so important, why me?”

Crimson looks back towards the portrait behind her. Her mother’s kind face. It’s eyes are locked on Vera. Wine drips from the edges of Crimsons’ lips. The edge of Vera’s body was thrumming in time with the gnashing tune on the fly’s wings. She looks back up towards the vent in the corner of the room. A maggot falls out between the metal slats. Vera licks her lips slightly. Behind her, a single petal falls from off the chrysanthemum. The sound it makes while falling is the exact same note as the buzzing of the fly’s wings. Crimson scowles at the painting.

“Call it a mother’s intuition.” 

A pen click. The butler coughs. “Are you still interested?”

Vera turns towards the head butler and smiles. “Yea, I am, I think.”

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

The servants quarters were surprisingly large. 

The last place Vera worked at, a home of a minor ambassador from a foreign land, was little more than a broom closet with a gas range. The air smells like sulfur and blood, laiden so thick that you could taste it on the back of your tongue.

The Tyra Manor did not smell like sulfur and the quarters had their own kitchen attached to it. Vera counted six additional bodies in the communal space. One was smoking a cigarette, one was playing chess with another. Each were young, attractive types, like Crimson Tyra was. Hard bodies, pretty hair. Obsessively clean, as well. One held a glass up to the light, his fingernails were bitten to stumps with not a speck of dirt or grime underneath them. That melodic buzzing could still be heard here, yet it didn’t seem to bother anyone in the room. Each of them were conversing, rapt entirely in their companionship. Vera could have been a fly on the wall for all she knew. She placed her bag on the ground next to the door, enough to be out of sight from the hallway, lest any of the Tyra’s see her belongings.

It was the man at the window between the kitchen and the common area who noticed her first. His teeth were perfectly aligned, and only slightly yellowed. His eyes had a slight band of copper between the iris and the sclera, and his eyelashes were long and inviting. He extended his hand up to beckon her further. It was at that moment, the other’s in the servants quarters turned to look at her. Not all in unison, mind you. But with a noticeable, almost deliberate delay in their towards her. Not unlike when an actor knows he is to be cut off in the script.

“New girl, right?” The man with the pretty eyes said as if they were waiting for her. Vera began walking towards him before he had even called her over. Yet when he spoke, when the words dripped from his mouth, she stopped, acutely aware of her movement. She felt them watch her and felt almost comforted by it. To be the center of their obsession, if but for a moment. The man continued, his smile still wide and boisterous.“Come come, get a drink in you.” 

She walks up to the window to the kitchen, as if this room was repurposed from some entertaining space. There were no stools next to the window, so Vera opted to stand. She wants to tell them she doesn’t drink, but can’t find it in her to lie. “Are we supposed to be drinking on the clock?” Vera asks instead.

“Bit of a teetotaler, hey?” The woman next to her responds. Her hair is auburn and she has long, slender arms. Her fingers are marred with scratches, each appearing now to only just be healing. Burrowing scars mark the length of her forearm. She sees Vera eyeing her and flashes her a coy smile. “Daphne.” She extends her hand towards Vera and she takes it. Her grip is delicate, and they hold for what seems a moment too long. 

“Vera Hershal.” Vera says almost off handedly. She still has not let go of her hand.

“You from Mariposa, Vera?” Daphne asks as the man with the pretty eyes fills a pristine glass with a slightly brown liquid. It sloshes around as if the consistency of syrup. 

“Who is?” The man with the pretty eyes chuffs, as if it was some grand joke.

“No, actually.” Vera smiles and takes her hand from Daphne’s to the glass. There is no discernible change in warmth between the two of them. “I’m from up north. Hinterlands. Near Verak.”

“You miss it?” Daphne asks, rolling her finger around the rim of her drink.

Vera takes hold of the drink in both of her hands. She rubs the ridge of the glass absentmindedly for a moment. The man with the pretty eyes leans forward a bit too far. So does Daphne.

“Do any of you actually hear that?” Vera finally asks. That buzzing, that droning, that gnawing sound. It was all Vera could do to actually pay attention to the two of them. It was at once melodic and dissonant, not altogether unpleasant. But its ever presentness, its continuity, flowed around hallways and into the rooms of Manor Tyra. There weren’t even any flies here, nor had she seen any in her walk down to the servants quarters. This place had looked scoured and clean, with hard pressed wood, treated with any sort of preservatives, and paneling placed at odd angles with secant points. The whole of the manor seemed to converge on what? All the pointing lines that focused on what? 

Daphne smiles. “No, not really.” Her thumb is pressing deep and hard into the ridge on the bottom of her drink. Vera furrows her brow. Her eyes dilate, her throat feels thick and full. Daphne looks over to Vera and nudges her with her own shoulder. “Not a lot of people regret moving to Mariposa, so I don’t blame you.”

Vera sighs and brings the cup to her lips. It is sweet, whatever is inside of it. Like rosewater, or hibiscus. Absolutely no discernable taste of alcohol. Like drinking liquified potpourri. Whatever grain or fruit the spirit was made from, this mixer almost fully masked its flavor. Vera, for a moment, closes her eyes, ignoring the frustration of being misunderstood building behind them. It does not taste like Verak. She is almost certain of it. But it doesn’t taste like Mariposa, either. She has had plenty of drinks in her stay here, and this certainly was not one of them.

“I’m Adrien.” The man with the pretty eyes finally coughs out. Vera opens her eyes and realizes just how long she had been drinking. The glass in her hands was half gone. “I’m the entremétier in the Tyra kitchen.”

“Which means he also cooks our meals too.” Daphne gesticulates towards the kitchen, glass still in hand. It was a small, cozy thing. Still unheard of in Mariposa, a kitchen for use only by the help staff. But the size of the Tyra manor almost required such atomization of labor. “He’s only typically on call when Tyra is hosting the Queen.”

“So it means, Miss Hershal, you’re stuck with me.” Adrien smiles and leans on the kitchen windowsill. His arms are toned and sinewy. He looks as if he’d be stringy, chalky in any sort of long standing soup. A thin, bristly mustache covers his upper lip, as if he was proud to be sporting it. “I hope the other’s like you just as much as the miss does”

Daphne snorts, undignified and beautiful. She is still shoulder to shoulder with Vera. “I think they will, yea.” She takes another drink. A fly, small thing with beady, crimson eyes, crawls from behind Daphne’s ear. Its wings harmonized with that buzzing that Vera could not get from out of her mind. If anyone saw it, no one made mention of it. The rest of the servants in the quarters were each obsessed with their conversational partners, enraptured with each other. The air was warm and sickly sweet. Like the potpourri that was at Vera’s mother’s wake.

“You’re so sure, huh?” Vera slightly bumps back into Daphne, separating the two of them for a moment.

“Yeah, you’re so sure, huh?” Adrien begins to pour himself his own drink. “You said that about the last girl, too.”

“What happened to her?” Vera asked.

“Rosalind liked her a little too much, so Crimson let her go.” Daphne sighed wistfully, as if she liked her just as much. As her mouth opened, that same buzzing came from inside Daphne. As if her lips were not making the same movements as they were before, like they were simply opening up for the noise to come out instead of forming the words themselves. “Our employer is a bit of a meticulous one.”

“Heard she works down near Le Marc street, in the lower wards.” Adrien lifts the liquor to his mouth and drinks it greedily. Liquid spills from the sides of his lips, his mouth open too wide for the mouth of the glass. His tongue lulls out the side.

“Nice one, too.” Daphne sighs, her voice almost drowned out by Adrien’s drinking. Like a pig drinking from a trough, guttural and wet. Vera looks at Adrien, at his bulging throat and his ragged breath when he takes the drink away from his lips. “Sweet girl, ya know? She brought a little basket of treats to introduce herself. Cared a bit too much. Cute little thing.” Adrien places the glass back on the table a little too forcefully, fills it again from the brown bottle, and then begins drinking again. The liquor spills around his hand, as if the act of pouring is foreign to him. He catches his breath. “Like, ah, you.”

“Is he-” Vera looks back at Daphne for a moment, then back at Adrien. His glass is on the table, he has resumed his previous position, resting against the counter. The glass is empty. It is dripping with condensation. A pool of liquid has formed from where he spilled the drink in haste. His hands are dripping wet. The words die in Vera’s throat.

Daphne raises an eyebrow. “Is he?”

Vera puts her own glass down.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

“If you ask me, I think she has the Scarlet Song.”

The light is dim in their shared bedroom. Vera had, by chance, been assigned to the room that Daphne had been staying in. Two queen beds, facing each other on opposite sides of a room. In many of the workhouses of Mariposa, servants were assigned twin beds, as if to keep from any impropriety on company time. The walls were dark, with painted and stained wood paneling along the lower half of the wall. Vera had retired to bed some time ago, her arms behind her head as she stared at the ceiling.

When Daphne started to talk, Vera almost instinctively looked over to the corner of the room, on the side of where the door was. A single, budding chrysanthemum sat on an end table in that corner. It's leaves having all fallen off long ago, yet regrowing new ones outside of their budding season. She watches as a maggot crawls along the stem. Vera swears she sees it look at her.

“Scarlet Song?” Vera asks after exchanging glances with the maggot. She sits up in her bed, her nightgown feeling a bit too thin in the chill of the night’s air.

“Yea, Rosalind.” Daphne had already been sitting up, her arms wrapped around her knees. Her hair was up in a bun, her makeup had been removed. She had no wrinkles, at least less than she had during the previous day. Her hands were still immaculate, palms red from her repeated washing. “She goes out for a hunt in Blackvien years ago, then traps herself in her room.”

“Did you meet with her when you were hired?” Vera tilts her head to the side somewhat.

“Yea I did. We sat in the rose garden with her wife.” Daphne looks towards the dead chrysanthemum in the corner of the room, a plant she had been meaning to get rid of for some time. Its leaves have long wilted away. “She asked me some weird questions, then said congrats.”

“Oh,” Vera sighed. “Crimson and the head butler did my interview.”

Daphne sits up a bit higher. Her voice is still hushed. “See! That’s exactly what I mean.” She leans forward in the bed. “She goes on some hunting trip just before the last outbreak happened there. Comes back and locks herself in that room.”

“Or Crimson locks her in that room.”

“Might be.”

“Might be?” 

“Maybe she wants to keep Mariposa safe, or her mother safe.” Vera sighs and looks back towards the blooming plant. “It’s the disease of undeath, right?”

Daphne takes her arms from off around her knees and moves towards the edge of the bed. “Scarlet Song is a psychosocial illness. You don’t just catch it by being near someone who’s sick.”

“That wasn’t how I heard it spread.”

“Well obviously, if you’re around someone who’s sick, you might get sick.” Daphne rolls her eyes. Her iris glowed in the dim of the room. The way the stray light came in through the window, it almost made Daphne look like a cat you shined a light at. Red, like a photo caught mid flash. “But that’s only because you’re caring for them, because you pour so much into them.”

Vera brings her knees to her chest. The maggot begins to sing, harmonizing with the buzzing that had been blaring in her ears. “How do you get it then?”

“It worms its way into the parts of your mind that care.” Daphne finishes moving, sitting on the edge of the bed now. She was no more than a couple feet from Vera, but Vera could feel the warmth of her breath, the sickly, floral flavor on the tongue. Her lips were scarlet, her arms were slender and inviting. “Poisons your thoughts into obsession and infatuation. Makes you an object of desire, makes your vices just that much more apparent. Gluttony, lust, wrath.They call it the undead disease because of conservation of energy. All that obsession can’t just disappear once you die.”

Shambling corpses, replete of any desire but what was core to them.

“You hear voices, you see things, you misattribute motivations and feelings towards someone else.” Daphne gets up from off the bed. She is standing now, in naught but a night shirt. Her skin is translucent in the moonlight, like still water. Her eyes red and beautiful. “You could be infected, and just not know. It creeps into your mind, makes a vice of your heart.”

There is little now between their two beds, with Daphne standing square between them. Vera traced the lines of her shoulders, of her chin, of her lips. The edges of Daphne hummed and thrummed, as if their component parts sang with the maggot. Like a lichtenberg figure, Daphne seemed all secant lines. Convergent points, each inviting further study and obsession. Vera closed her eyes.“It almost sounds nice.”

Daph leans forward, towering over Vera on the bed. She raises a hand and, for a moment, Vera worries Daph might strike her. Her hand is now on Vera’s cheek, fingers finding themselves resting on her cheekbone. Vera, instinctually, bites Daphne’s palm. Daphne grips her head a bit tighter, blood running rivulets down into Vera’s hungry mouth. It is sweet, like the potpourri at her mother’s wake. Her other hand rests where Vera’s neck meets her shoulders, thumb placed gingerly just above her adam’s apple. Vera leans into the embrace, not sure whether Daphne will choke her or kiss her back. She would beckon either, readily and happily. Her skin was hot, roiling chaos. The cells across her body a throng of music, a veritable choir of blissful immolate. 

Daphne gasps, the heat proving too much for her. She opens her eyes and sees Daphne there, sitting on the edge of her bed, now seeming so far apart. Vera didn’t even notice her moving. Her skin was flush, her hands trembling, hand dripping blood onto her white gown. Daphne will not look her in the eyes, but a blissful smile is plastered on her face. She is shaking. “Yea, it does sound nice.”

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Rosalind Tyra had a portrait of her wife on the bed stand next to her.

This was the first thing that Vera noticed when walking into the magnate’s room. Not the flowers that should have rotted months ago, not the empty plate picked clean of bones, not even the unmoving, veiled form that lay on the bed, covered by a single, white sheet. It was a simple photo, and the lights in the room had long been burnt out. A golden leaf frame surrounded the photo, with no glass covering it. The photo was yellowed and sour. Mary Tyra-Dayshaper was a young woman again, her hair it's natural blonde instead of the gray it was now. In the background, one of Rosalind’s kills at their chateau near Blackvien. Some grand reptile, head severed and blood dripping into a nearby patch of chrysanthemums. Mary was smiling, with a kind set of eyes. In her hair, a little flower pin. Sitting beside her, a child. Scarlet red hair and a bearded ax next to her. She was not smiling and she was staring a hunter’s stare at Vera.

The portrait was facing Rosalind’s bed, where she lay under a perfectly white sheet. No stains, like Vera had expected. No grime or muck or even dust. The room looked well kept, the room looked as pristine as the rest of the house. This is what Vera would be hired to do. To keep Rosalind company, to keep where she lays. Rosalind seemingly did not notice Vera’s entrance, even if the maid wasn’t particularly keen on staying quiet. As soon as she entered the small room, however, she felt almost reverent. As if her breaths must be measured as not to take too much oxygen, as if her feet must be kept in check lest it squash some beast underfoot. The stained glass window let in multi-colored light, trickling in and catching dust in its delicate beams. It was midmorning after a fitful night. The sky in Mariposa had that post-dawn haze, with nary a cloud in sight. Vera entered and shut the door.

The second thing that Vera noticed was the incessant, beautiful melody that had suffused the entirety of Tyra Manor had ceased as soon as she shut the door. It had become so much that Vera had almost tuned it out entirely by the time she woke next to Daphne this morning. And yet, in shutting it out, Vera had missed it in its absence. The walls vibrated, like being trapped in a room without air, like being stuck in the center of a storm. The silence rattles the wood, it rattles the bed frame, it rattles Vera’s bones.

“Good morning, Mrs. Tyra.” Vera says in a cloying affect like she was instructed. “Have you been sleeping well?”

The body does not respond. There is no rising and falling of the chest. Vera crosses the room gingerly. The tray in her hands rattles somewhat. The hem of her skirt rises with each step. Vera waits for a response that will never come. She places the tray down on the end table, next to the photo of Mary Tyra-Dayshaper. It is dried ham and it costs more than Vera will make that day. Mary is stout and elegant. Her sun kissed skin catches the Blackvien light just so and her hair smells of seabreeze and salt. 

“I have your meal.” Vera continues in rote repetition. Do not deviate, she tells herself.. “Will you eat it here or should we be expecting you down today?”

The body does not respond. Vera sits on the edge of the bed next to her in a fit of compassion. She was a nurse, before she was a maid. Back when money could be made in healing. She places her hand on the sheet almost absentmindedly, breaking the script. Perhaps she is just sleeping a bit tighter, perhaps she is just too cozy in the warmth of the morning. Vera creeps a smile as her hands reach the hem of the bedline.

“It’d be nice if you’d join us, I’m sure your daughter would-”

And that is when she hears it. The song. Not the disjointed choir of the maggots, not the single-noted sludge of the servants. But the whole of it. Every note, their counterplay, the harmonies, the sharps and the flats. It is like a cacophony of angels, like every tragedian of Mariposa was caught alight in a single, raptorious song. It is like screaming. It is like pain. It is like the crackling of ash and the dripping love of slavering mouths. It is incineration of the stars in the sky.

It is pure beauty and it drives Vera to tears. 

It drives her to the floor.

Sorrow was now burning into her cheeks. Her tears sublimating in time with the harmonies that now echo in her ears. She brings her hands to her face, as if she were to sob. A choked, painful note comes out of Vera’s mouth as the song stops, as she leaves Rosalind Tyra. She thinks she hears the whole manor scream.

The body does not respond. It sits there, mocking what obvious love Vera had felt come from her touch. This was not Rosalind as she knew Rosalind. Rosalind was the violent song that now dripped from her open mouth, not the meat sitting ripe and raw under the sheets. The song crawls from Vera’s pours like maggots. They stain the hem of Vera’s dress, mixing with the blood and bile that were pooling from her screaming, singing mouth. They are slick and inviting.

And then the discordance creeps back in.

Vera shoots her eyes towards the door as the incessant and beautiful song of the maggots is in her ears again, eyes burning from between her stained fingers. Red petals flow down her cheeks. And her mouth tastes only of song. In the doorway stands Crimson Tyra. Her boots are muddy and on her shoulder is a worn rifle. Its barrel still hot from the hunt. In her other hand, her dominant hand, her killing hand, was a hunting ax. It was bearded. It was dripping with ash.

“Did you do this to her?” Vera manages to get out as the song creeps behind her now fractiline eyes.

“I knew you’d break.” Crimson smirks, then quickly scowles. “What did my mother say?” Her voice is lacking any of the congeniality she once had. She takes a step forward, tracking the mud into the sickly sweet room.

Vera choked again, maggots spilling from her lips. She pulled herself forward. If only she could share this love with Crimson, maybe, maybe, maybe.

Crimson brings her boot down on what once was Vera’s hand, skin now splitting, unable to contain the flowers anymore. “I hired you for this reason, Miss Hershal.” Her voice was cruel, spitting and cutting. “Now, what did my mother say?”

“Sorry!” Vera sings, her bones breaking and eating away at her skin. “She says she’s sorry!”

Crimson sighs and frowns. She places the rifle on the floor. She hefts her hunting ax with both hands now. Its blade is dripping with blood. “That’s what she said the last time.” Crimson rejoins.

If Vera could just get to Daphne, just show her how beautiful this was when everything could be better. What once was Vera’s lips are replete with words and notes, some begging, some hateful, some pleading for violence. “I can make you! We can feel better!” Vera manages something coherent. “You need me! Love!”

Crimson smiles. She brings the ax above her head. Everything could be better, if she just opened her heart to the song. “I only needed you for this, Miss Hershal.”

Then, the body does not respond.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

“We are in need of an entire new staff, Miss DuBois.” The head butler asks. Anne sat in front of him, her legs crossed at the ankles. Behind him, Crimson sat in her thick, leather chair. Behind them both, a painted portrait of Rosalind Tyra. “So, let me ask you. Why is it you want this job?”

Crimson smiles and taps her finger just once.

And the flies begin crawling from the vents.

[cupoftrembling]

Provocateur

“It should have been you.”

These bitter, cruel words have been said an uncountable number of times. Trust me dear reader, I have tried. It was my first undertaking, before attempting to reconcile the history of the war in Mariposa: to catalog the things that wound, the words and events that drag us into the muck of vile emotion. A book of past indiscretions, both mine and everyone else's. The first time I heard them rang as cruel as the most recent, and they have been hurled at me more times than I could count. 

There is something of an art to wishing harm on another, and there are certainly a lot of ways to do so. You could condemn them to justice, you can harm and injure with reckless abandon. The people of the Shattered Planes are adept in injury, and there are more than one way to kill. But to come to an event where you have to mutter such cruelties? To hate, deep and as true as sunlight, is common. Boring. Just as common is to weep for injustice dealt to the undeserving. An entire war was fought for these injustices, a war that shattered the sky and killed Gods, because a mother lost her children far too young. But the conflux of them? To hate so truly that you wish an injustice done that was committed towards someone innocent? To wish upon them a different type of pain, to injure them with a thought, because these words are not said to some stranger. Someone who slights you, large or small, does not conjure such hatred. This wish only takes root when there is some other pain to compare the suffering of your target towards.

I am sure these words are familiar to you, dear reader. That somewhere, someone who had trusted you, someone who had loved you had said these words to you. That the acidity of their voice, the venom of their words seared off the top layer of your mind. A lover, a child, a parent. I can not say whether or not you deserved it. I hope you didn’t.  And if you didn’t, I am sorry, truly and sorrowfully. If you did, I can only hope that, somewhere, some sort of justice prevailed. That you understood enough of pain to change, to try and effect some difference on yourself.

Or maybe, and if this is the case I truly am sorry, you are stuck in a horrible juxtaposition. You both did and did not deserve it. That somewhere, deep in you, you knew that it was cruel to lob such vitriol towards you, even if in your heart of hearts knew that you hurt someone. Stuck in the liminal space of attempting to better yourself while also defending your ego. A superposition of injury, where one might not take fault but still feel the burn and sting of venom. Where the words echo across your mind, where even an image, a scent, a sound can conjure the memory of that pain.

Where, like Sorrow Brightwind, you catch your eye in your own reflection, and you hear those words in your own voice.

The first time she had heard her own mind tell her such awful cruelties was three weeks after the fire. She was in that little flower shop down Le Marc street, the one with the towering Vily with the soft hands. Above her, an imperial war balloon floated gently and she had thought, in that moment, she could feel the gun pointed at her. Feel the marksman adjusting his scope. Her verdant skin caught the sun, her horns were backswept and aerodynamic. She was the pinnacle of cambion beauty, in which she would have been revered and adored as a temple goddess some years prior on the coasts. However, she toyed idly with a pair of twisted stag horns, denoting a different kind of servility. The gold was cool to the skin, tamping down the infernal heat of Mrs. Brightwinds’ heritage. 

She was, as well, dangerously thin. Her eyes were sunken and slightly bulged, her fingers shook with hunger, the crust of sick was crusted over on the edge of her mouth. Her hair, nestled beautifully in a bun between her horns, was greasy and covered in flyaways. She still moved in her traditional, graceful ways, as her feet more ghosted the cobblestones of the Lower Wards than they did traverse them. However, each step felt more and more unsure, not yet bordering on nervous or tedious. It seemed, as if for the first time in her life, that the composure was taking a considerable effort, kept only with a white knuckled grip.

To the more militant and faithful, this would be an unusual sight, a graceful gait the  demarcation of a successful Rappeles Toi. The weakness in the body is the mark of the strength of spirit, that one was able to survive treachery and biological peril. However, to Mariposa and her citizens who feast on grief, Sorrow looked just like any number of debtors and renters that crowd the streets.. Starved, frail, she took to the streets like so many of her now kin, homeless and penniless in the wake of Imperial victory. The sun above caught the Concordat of Miracles, casting Sorrow in shadow. The wings, all six thousand and twelve of them, strained against the iron rivetsrivulets  and silver nails that that a litigious grin placed. A halo, a purely Mariposian invention of servility, obscured a set of its eyes. Sorrow had heard the story of Queen Mariposa the Litigious and the First Miracle. The thing above the city was barely more than a feral angel, thousands of years of imprisonment and time had eroded any sense of mind or thought, obliterated the higher thinking and connection to the Grand Weft of Order.

And yet, why could she not shake the feeling that it was watching her? Why could she sense, even here on unhallowed ground, that her God was watching her every stumble and impetuous motion? She stopped in the center of Le Marc street to attempt to get a better look at the Concordat, but found her eyes unable to focus on it, found the sun behind it too blinding, too painful to completely stare into.

The street was busy, of course. The Lower Wards, through war or famine, were always packed. They were, naturally, the most populous parts of the city. Where all sorts of underthings and beastfolks congregate with those who powered and ran the city. Obviously, the Lower Wards were where the industry was conducted, where things that were manufactured from imported materials would be constructed, packaged, and shipped out. The air was heavy with industry, with song,with chants and signs. Above, much like Sorrow had intuited, three imperial sharpshooters surveilled the scene. From their vantage, above the city, the people flowed like water. They moved around obstacles, chanting in rushing waves, and, most importantly, they seemed almost organic, uncoordinated and yet synchronous in their movements. The torches and the signs they carried, things that denoted them as living and feeling individuals with autonomy and rationale, got lost in the scope of it all. They seemed almost like a natural force, like something to be overcome. Like the frost beaten away with shelter, like a river diverted with a dyke. Mariposa, the blood that flowed in the people and in her streets, was not fully to be understood, at least to those three sharpshooters, each cracking jokes about taking out a flower pot above the head of one of the rioters. They were inhuman -- beasts to be tamed, to be beaten and broken.

Sorrow saw the same flower pot that the imperial sharpshooters saw, saw a cambion man lifting a child onto his shoulders to steal a petal from it. And yet, she found that the distance did not change that thought in her mind. Mariposa, the people who lived in it, relied on that baser sense. They ate, they slept, they reacted, they marched. Reactionary was the Mariposa. The corporate lords didn’t fully understand the Grand Weft of Order, nor diddo the proletariat marching here. And yet, even with the same Imperial mindset, she glanced upwards, towards the snipers and scowled. 

Sorrow walked these streets for hours. Her mother did not expect her back for some time. The young Oflay was enough to deal with, Sorrow was sure of that. After her Rappeles Toi ended, after she emerged from that room, covered in tears and scratches and faith, Madam Brightwind insisted she get some air, insisted that she get some of the city in her. Sorrow had hoped that it would clear her mind, which was like the keen blade of a razor  after two weeks of careful, mournful contemplation. Rappeles Toi had that effect on the religious. It was a fasting of all sensations, from where a different person emerges, if they emerge at all. Isosa demands that her followers honor those who are lost by making those left behind think of nothing else. Not food, not sunlight, not sleep or water or warmth or family. For two weeks, your grief subsumes you, for which there can be no comfort.

Many did not survive their first Rappeles Toi. Even fewer survive their second. It was always described as an act of honor, a rapturous event where you flay off the skin of grief and emerge, renewed and reborn. Theologians of Isosa talk of the zeal of hunger, how contemplation and reverence allows the sadness to flow through you, allowing one access to truer, purer emotions that are otherwise denied to you by petty physical realities such as hunger or love. That the sorry ways of grief practiced by the other cultures left marks on the body and on the soul, whereas this purification, this castigation allowed for the sorrow to slough off of you. It was a better way to heal. Hearing them speak, I was almost convinced of it myself. The way they were so right, so sure of themselves made me doubt what little I knew of suffering. It was in the eyes, a brightening flame of devotion that even they did not realize was truly burning. 

Sorrow had no such zeal about her. She ghosted the city streets of Mariposa with no reverence, with no renewal. Her shoulders were heavy, free of any absolution. Her arms were clutched around her waist, hands on either one of her elbows in an attempt to keep out the chill. Around her, the city bustled in its grief. The man she passed sitting on the gutter held a pink slip in his hand. A crescent and sword, symbols of the newly nationalized businesses by the Empire of Night, was stamped on his termination. A woman walked beside Sorrow, a rifle slung openly in front of her. It was her husband’s, once, and she had never fired it in her life. Sorrow looked her in the eyes and nodded, not a word exchanged between the two. A child, no older than Oflay, sat on the shoulders of what Sorrow could only assume was her grandfather. A stout man, missing an eye and half of his teeth. Her parents were nowhere to be seen. 

Was this, too, a Rappeles Toi? A national mourning, felt by every single man in Mariposa?

Sorrow was not a grand theologian, nor philosopher. She did not idle herself with petty reasonings and arguing about the grand weft of Isosa. At least, she hadn’t before. But here, she found herself walking with them, unaware of where they were truly going. A procession through the streets of the Lower Wards, galvanized by something they were unaware of. And that thought could not leave her, could not escape the barbed wire of her mind, its limbs tangled and snagged by the razors keened by her hunger and sadness. That these people, a civilization often derided by adherents of Isosa, are themselves sloughing off something.

“Where are we going?” Sorrow finally found the presence to ask. The thought had clawed at her for nigh on an hour, although she never questioned that they were, in fact, going somewhere. The woman beside her, who carried her husband’s rifle, looked down at the frail woman with a mixture of surprise and confusion. The procession had, until this point, been roughly silent. A vigil, marching through the streets, only occasionally punctuated by a wail or a yawp. 

“Are you lost, sweet thing?” The woman asks, forcing a smile. Sorrow looked young, delicate almost. The woman with the rifle knew what a Rappeles Toi looked like and placed a reassuring hand on her back.

“No, not lost.” Sorrow responded, still marching with the crowd. “Just unsure.”

The woman with the rifle smiled and rubbed her thumb against Sorrow’s shoulder reassuringly. The way that she imagined Sorrow’s mother did, once. The way Madam Brightwind never had. “There’s a demonstration at the university. Monsieur Georges will be speaking out against the Fleurs.”

Sorrow almost wanted to ask for whom the vigil was for, although I am not sure the woman with the rifle could have answered her. “San Bernadine?” Sorrow paused. “That’s.” 

“About seven kilometers from here?” The woman laughs, but keeps her eyes on the horizon. A laugh of habit, taking the place of anything actually humorous. The type of laugh you make for others, to assuage their fears. Around them, many were laughing like that. They laughed at the snipers, they laughed with their children.

Sorrow shook her head, hair now falling in her face. The stones beneath her cloven hooves wore against her, grating into her mind with every drudging step. She could hear the thousands of souls clattering against them, walking closer and closer into the city’s heart. “Are we going to walk that whole way?”

The woman with the rifle shrugged. “What else can we do but walk together?”

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“Why haven’t they started shooting yet?”

The question did not have an obvious answer, else why would Sorrow Brightwind ask it? But, when she looked back at her companions, they all regarded her with confusion. She turned away from them, looking back towards the demonstration on the streets below. She had never seen the campus of the San Bernadine University, no less step foot upon its grounds. And yet, here Sorrow was, her feet dangling over the edge of one of the academic buildings, feeling the rough stone of the banister digging into her exposed thighs. Below her, on the cobble of the campus grounds, the occasional hoot or yawp from the series of demonstrators could be heard through the overwhelming din of chanting and crackling of flame. 

Nearby, a fire was lit in an overturned trash can. It looked more like a squatters rally, a collection of the destitute and discarded of Mariposa congregating here for warmth, together. Further into the crowds, Stolynn Georges stood above the rest on a makeshift pulpit, his words amplified by nothing but Mariposa’s scorn. A haze hung in the air over him and the natural amplification of the Rae Courtyard made him a giant.

“How many of you worked for a corporate lord?” Stolynn asked, hands gesticulating over the crowd. “How many of you made your daily bread working for a Tyra, a Vujčić, a Fleur?” There was a sudden, desperate rush from the citizens that surrounded him. Even from this rooftop, from where Sorrow and her collective should not have been able to make out the tenor of his words, there is a sudden urge to nod from the unionboys. Each of them branded, in more ways than one, in corporate logos. The Tyra Knife, the Fleur Flower, the Vujčić Bullseye, they are a scar on the bodies of Mariposa. And above them all, nestled deeply in the breast of the city, is the Mariposian Crown. The grandest Corporate Lord of them all.

Stolynn takes a deep breath in, loud enough that the whole city might hear. “How many of these Lords went to work for the Empire after things went shit? Our Queen disappears and leaves us holding the bag?” He glances back towards the Imperial line forming behind him. Sorrow could not see anything beyond a formless, faceless mass of body armor and rifles, the things she had come to expect from the Empire of Night. Stolynn turns back towards the crowd in front of him. “And now, the magnanimous Fleur steps out of the shadows to lead us? To bring us to heel?”

She could not make out the particulars of Stolynn’s appearance from this distance. He was a cambion, much like herself. The infernal red skin and capricious tail gave as much away. Perhaps he was not from the Cambion Coast. His lack of a virtue name, like Sorrow’s, was some indication of that. Records of Mr. Georges’ legacy are spotty at best. Whatever few manifestos that survived the War of the Five Queens focus more on his theory and doctrine, less about the man who wrote them. Georges was a Mariposian name, at least. An old one, records from previous Queen’s show families of George’s paying a myriad of their corporate taxes. But it is not unheard of that people who venture to the city of the outcasts pick new names for themselves. Sometimes it is out of necessity, sometimes it is out of guilt. Sometimes, it is easier to leave such things behind. To reforge yourself fully and truly.

That thought weighed heavy on Sorrow’s mind. She looked back towards her companions, unsure what they were leaving behind. The long walk to the college was the first time she had met the armed woman. . She knew little of her, but enough to trust, I suppose. Beside her was a dwarf missing an eye, a red bandana tied tight around his shooting arm, as if to staunch bleeding. Around his neck, a small bullet glowed in zealous red. It sang, humming gently to the ambient radiation of the universe in a way that unnerved Sorrow to properly look at. And behind the two of them was a reforged mechanized man, Imperial serial number filed off and chassis repainted from night black to silver and red. His gears and circuits whirred, oscillating in time with the ambient machinery of his weapon. I don’t think Sorrow heard him speak during this whole encounter. None of this brigade looked even twice at him, even if his make was clearly imperial. A small, crescent moon is engraved onto his faceplate, right where his hair would have met his brow if he were to have either. Sixteen lights arranged in sequence were his eyes and his mouth glowed in the same silvery blue. 

Sorrow’s face fell to a grimace, a frown. Was this how she was seen? As constituent parts of a past in decay? As the refuse left over from traumatic events? Maybe, it would be easier to become someone new. To amputate any part of her past, to slough off her husband. Like the mechanized man scoured himself of any imperial definition, how the dwarf leaned so heavily into his unionboy aesthetic. 

And then, her eyes lay on the woman’s rifle. See the care in the wood, how splinters and seams were filled to seal any damage. How the gunmetal was polished and brushed. How gingerly she held that weapon of war. How death followed her, foreshadowed by her. And Sorrow thinks she understands. Her face lightens up, her hands grip the parapet a bit tighter.

Behind Stolynn, the men with rifles shifted somewhat. Maybe it was the way the wind adjusted, maybe it was the way they swayed somewhat in opposition to the wind. Maybe it was the way that, even at this distance, Sorrow could feel them tightening their grip. “Our new benefactors.” Stolynn continued, gesticulating both towards the tower and towards the soldiers behind him. “Seek a new Mariposa. One bereft of ‘unclean’ labor, one bereft of the people who had built this city for so many years.” Sorrow narrowed her eyes and turned back towards her companions, each of whom hadn’t responded to her. 

“Why haven’t they started shooting yet?” Sorrow asks again, this time with more urgency. “He mocks them, openly. I can almost feel their rage from here.”

Each of them were armed and had opted to stay around the periphery of the rally. Lessons learned from a rough kettle some years ago. Sorrow was not with weapons, but something about them did not make her feel unsafe. A gut feeling, a note on the back of her tongue. Isosian doctrine teaches adherents to avoid such magics like sense and intuition. “Trust only your eyes, trust only your ears.” Matron Brightwind beat into her.  “All else will deceive you. All else will ruin.” The Wolf trusted such synchronicity, the teachings say, and it led to rebellion. To the shattering of the planes.

And yet, in looking at them, all those thoughts slid to the back of her mind. The voices she heard were just her own. She looked to the dwarf standing on the parapet, towards the large gun in his hand. Cogs and machinery, not unlike the mechanized man behind them, thrumming and humming in time with the bullet around his neck. As if they were one part of one another, as if the gun and the man were one in the same. They each were dressed in the color of Stolynn and his brigadiers, Sorrow came to understand. Unionboys from the Lower Wards. A type of Mariposian lawyer, despite how much they despised the term. Hired by men and women of industry, those that worked the machines and the canneries, to serve their own interest. Even if they refuse to admit they practiced the Queen’s Law, Stolynn’s Brigade often fought on the courts of the public for the public. Enforcers for some sort of common right, against the will of the corporate lords. 

They were no strangers to violence, and they looked the part. Perhaps, the woman with the rifle sought to include Sorrow in their ranks. To fold her into the brigade, to give her purpose and direction. A place to drive her Rappeles Toi. I don’t know. I wish I did, it would help me make sense of this.

The woman with the rifle stifled a grimace at Sorrow’s question, as if the talk of violence upset her, as if the use of that gun she swung around was disgusting. She wasn’t much older than her, realistically. Maybe five years, maybe ten. But she was born in Mariposa, and the woman with the rifle had seen her fair share of corporate violence. She glanced over towards the mechanized pillboys and their escorts that flank the arena, each with their own rifles drawn, but not leveled. If they were Os’ men, if they were in the pockets of the remaining corporate lords, this would have been nothing but a bloodbath. Tempers and heat igniting as soon as Stolynn opened his mouth.

“Because no one has told them to, dear.” The woman with the rifle said, her face falling back into its soft, matronly visage. Besides her, the dwarf with his face painted with a red hand print over a missing eye chuffed. 

“At least not yet.” He remarked. The woman with the rifle reached over and flicked him in the back of his bald head. “Hey! Whatcha-”

Sorrow looked over to her riotous companions, at the group she had somehow found herself among. Madam Brightwind would have been disgusted by her group of friends, each twitching and frothing with something that approximated zeal. She would have discussed how such emotions are ruinous. And Sorrow oft would have listened. And yet, such teachings felt so far now, so distant.

The woman with the rifle crouched next to Sorrow, her hands now on the parapet that the cambion sat on. She eyed the soldiers that flanked Stolynn with distrust. She had seen him in the riots across Le Marc street some years ago, seen the old unionboy in the thick steam of riot. The soldiers stood differently than the corporate lawyer, more measured, more tactical with their hatred. And yet, each soldier she passes, each jackboot she sees in front of her, that facade of measured nature seems so fragile. On the streets below, the jackboots marched in formation through the riotous crowd, who themselves seem too timid to actually inflict any damage on them. No stones have been hurled, no shots fired. Just some broken glass, just some overturned benches. They clear their way through the crowd, who part around the jackboots like the sea around the bow of a boat. Their masks are polished to a mirror sheen, their footfalls are measured and in time, their shoulders are relaxed and their rifles are never level unless they are shooting. They are the facade of professionalism, betraying nothing, allowing nothing, forgiving nothing.

And yet, the woman with the rifle sees something familiar in them. It is in the way their chests rise and fall with breath, the way their hand never practices trigger discipline, the way they stare at you for just a second too long. The woman with the rifle looks down at the jackboots patrolling the streets, as if they are positioning themselves around the demonstration.

“That tower behind us? Dr. Mya’s pet project? How many stories of our ancestors are in there? How much has been stolen from us to pay for it? Stolen by people like Dr. Fleur?” Stolynn points an accusatory finger at the San Bernadine Tower, a tower that had stood as a sign of the private knowledge of the university, the tower that had long locked away knowledge of our world and of our past for just the learned and rich to access to. “The ideology that keeps those bricks from being used in our homes runs in this place, it keeps wealth and knowledge from those who produce it.” His finger curls inwards, pointing now towards the sky, towards the clouded out sun. Behind him, Sorrow could almost feel the soldiers smile.

And, in that moment, Sorrow understands as well. “They aren’t firing yet.” The woman with the rifle tells Sorrow. “Because they’re waiting for a better moment for our pain.”

Sorrow sighs and asks a more pointed question. “Why would they want to savor it?”

No one on that rooftop could answer her. They are not unfamiliar with cruelty. Not a one unfamiliar with sadism or enjoying being the boot. It is just this cruelty that escapes them, it is the cruelty of people who view you as lesser and themselves as greater. Even in the darkest hearts of the corpo lawyers, their glee was with persecution of their fellow Mariposian, having power over what could have been them.

“Whatever kindness General Rosengart may have portrayed in sicking the Butcher of Blackvien on us is up in smoke.” Stolynn continued, spittle flying, baptizing the crowd. “What few corporate lords remained sold their companies to the Empire. Instituted their so-called strictures and dictates here. The taxes of Daysend, the laws of Daysend. Not laws of Mariposa! Never laws of Mariposa!”

The crowd erupted, the whole of Mariposa seeming to come alive. Each hand gripping their pink slip a bit tighter, each man gripping his fellow just a bit harder. They screamed, they cried, they shouted and the air itself felt agitated. Sorrow saw her fellow Mariposian’s on the street below her, each inexplicably able to hear Stolynn despite the distance, began to turn towards the Imperial Jackboots patrolling the edge of the kettle. No violence, not yet. But even from this distance, even from the way that their backs are towards Sorrow, she could feel their snarls, their sneers. It was in the way their shoulders held them, it was in the way they leveled their rifles in unison, as if they had no need to communicate, as if they all knew what these people were. 

To the Imperial Soldier, such displays of gross nationalism was why Mariposa needed to be brought to heel. To the Imperial Soldier, no Mariposian ever could have been them. No one had told them to start firing, but they knew the order would be coming soon -- and patience was a virtue. Silence falls over the rooftop as wind whistles between them. The Unionboys look towards Stolynn, towards the kill zone that their fellow Mariposians now sit in. They see the groups congregating on the rooftops of the various campus buildings, see the glint of scopes across the San Bernadine Spire. They do not know whether or not they were friend or foe, they do not know whether or not the noose was tightening. The warm brick of the campus seemed duller for a moment, even as the cloud breaks and the sun of an early spring day begins to peek out in the fingers of the gods themselves, the Jacob’s Ladders reaching down from the divine heavens themselves. They shine across the Concordat of Miracles, that feral angel that watches over the whole of Mariposa.

Sorrow thinks to utter a prayer, thinks to ask her god for forgiveness for this city. To ask that the noose might not tighten. Her eyes meet the thousands and thousands of eyes of the Concordat, and she can feel her watching Sorrow, so much and so truly that she now feels comfortable ascribing the angel gender and agency. The words die in her throat, her mind reeling with only one thought, unsure and uncertain of its source. Was it divine? Was it a word of obliteration, to end all things? Sorrow swore she heard it, swore she felt it crawl into her ears from her shoulder. It nested in the back of her eyes, making even looking at such a divinity hard.

“You all deserve this.” The thought whispered. “It should have been you.”

Sorrow’s eyes drop low, breaking contact with the Concordat of Miracles. And the thought escapes her, leaves her mind the same way it entered. Slithering from behind her eyes and dropping onto the ground through her ear, taking with her all sense and vitality. Eyes remain open, unable to shut out the world around her.

This is when, my dear reader, she sees them. 

They are not imperial soldiers. Of this, Sorrow is sure. In this moment of despair, in this moment of un-vigilance, it is something to moor her, something to settle and nerve her. A truth she can cling to. Four individuals weave their way through the noxious crowd, who’s chanting and cheering began to reach a closer and closer fevered pitch. The imperial jackboots around them shuffle in their boots, still awaiting the order, still slavering with violence. As the crowds part around them, keenly aware of their intrusion, the four individuals do not provoke such a response. They weave through the crowd as if they are unseen, unnoticed. Sorrow first notices the speed at which they can move, how they can effortlessly brush past the citizens of Mariposa.

“We should warn Stolynn.” The woman with the rifle notes, seemingly unaware of Sorrow or her thoughts. She eyes the cambion man standing in the distance with a mixture of care and disdain. “Evacuate the protest.”

“Imperial protocol is not to fire unless fired upon.” The red and silver mechanized man stated. His voice was not as cold as Sorrow had thought it would be. It did not modulate in odd ways, it sounded almost too natural, even while parroting imperial code. “Unless otherwise threatened or potentially threatened.”

“Stu.” The dwarf chuffs. It almost sounds like a laugh, like some sort of deep, primal thing. His hand swept over the crowd like a farmer survailing his wheat and chaff. “They’re threatened by our very existence.” He sounds almost too proud of himself, too proud of his Mariposians.

“There’s someone down there.” Sorrow says meekly, the words more escaping than being stated. She eyes the four individuals dashing through the crowds, sees how they are dressed. Pressed, black suits with no room for tolerances. Each of them meticulously measured and cut as to fit only that individual and only at that time. If they were to grow a centimeter in any direction, the fit would be all off and fill the user with discomfort. Drawn from their breast holsters were E-99 oscillating revolvers, manufactured by Weyland Arms and Electronics, each with the same tolerances as their suits. 

There were no safeties on the E models of pistols, and only seven shots before the bullet that powered the firearm must be cycled to cool. They were barely functioning, highly experimental firearms that held together more so out of sheer will than any sort of engineering marvel. None survived the war, unable to hold itself together under the sheer strain of repeated use and fire. Expensive to maintain and purchase, but they could output a higher volume of fire than any other conventional handgun on the market. They were a killer's weapon. Not to disarm, not to scare or protect. Easily concealable, easy to hide in the vest of your coat. They could put a hole in a quarter inch body armor at 60 yards.

“What, you want to fling ourselves into the meat grinder too?” The woman with the rifle asked, although it was more like she was begging to. Her hand had not been off the handle of her rifle this entire time. Her mouth dripped with violence, so steeled was she to war. “Don’t you want to practice some law?” She half joked, eyes remaining down towards the crowd, ignoring Stolynn in his entirety.

Among the group of four, there was a gruff, white haired veteran of many wars, a sharp and cruel looking Villy, a fellow cambion man with skin as verdant as Sorrow’s, and a halfling who seemingly struggled to keep pace. None of them were noticed, not by the soon to be rioters, not the unionboys on the roof, not even the imperial jackboots. Sorrow swears she sees one of them turn, the young Villy maybe, towards her. She swears she sees him wink.

“Guys!” Sorrow exclaims. The heads of her companions snap towards her, their bickering dying down for a moment. “There’s someone in the crowd!”

The unionboys rush over to the parapet, their speed almost threatening to push poor Sorrow from off the edge. In a moment, and without any particular thought, all three of their hands find Sorrow’s shoulders, keeping her from teetering over the edge. As if they knew she was in trouble, as if they knew she was to die without them. Sorrow’s shaky hand draws a line towards the suits, and then the spell is seemingly broken. Like an illusion that shifts when one draws attention to it, the unionboys knew what, now, to look for.

The woman with the rifle scowls and bares her teeth. “Fleur agents.” She mutters. Her breath is hot on Sorrow’s neck, wet almost. Her hand tenses for a moment before she finds herself again. Her eyes snap down towards her hand on Sorrow’s shoulder, and sees the green skin bruising under her rage. She pulls away and looks at her hand for a moment. Her fingers tremble, her knuckles are white. Her face is unreadable.

Sorrow wants to look back towards her companions, to look them in the eyes for some kind of bearing, some kind of direction. Although she knows when she does, when she looks at the people who could be friends, she might lose sight of these agents. And, somehow, that thought scares her much more than any perceived lack of direction, any unmooring, ever could. These Fleur Agents move like predators through the crowd, like wolves through the whistling reeds. The way they skulk, the way they duck through people without breaking a stride or formation, the way their chests rise and fall in perfect synchronicity. Sorrow knows, beyond knowing, that they thrive living in the space between mystery and fact.

“Fleur agents?” Sorrow asks, as if she could force them out of that superposition, force them into one or the other. “Like Fleur Pharmaceuticals?”

The dwarf chuffs again. His hand on her shoulder is more reassuring, more comforting somehow. There is none of the pain like there was with the woman with the rifle, none of the hurt. “Our new pit bosses, right.” He debates taking a shot at them right here and now. He’s heard the stories, he’s heard why you don’t walk down Le Marc street after dark. “Corporate Lawyers and Dr. Fleur’s pet projects.”

“Reclusive rogues who rely on subterfuge and advanced biotechnology.” Stu mentions off handedly. His grip was cold, somewhere between the dwarf’s reassurance and the woman with the rifle’s anger. He holds on to Sorrow for stability and stability alone. “Fleur Pharmaceuticals was bought out by Queen Mariposa the Kingbreaker some one-hundred and sixty three years ago. They’ve been operating under various different shell corporations ever since.”

“You’re awfully knowledgeable, Stu.” The woman with the rifle remarks.

“I was a student here, once.” He says, his voice more monotone than he was intending. “At the college.”

“Must make your oil burn to see the place like this, huh Stu?” The dwarf half jokes before a moment of realization dawns upon him. The dwarf turned towards him and squinted. “Is that where you got your name?”

“Fleur Agents.” Stu continued, ignoring the dwarf’s question. “Have largely been considered a myth. Considered a story fathers tell their children.”

“They’re real.” The woman with the rifle mutters, vile dripping from her words. Her eyes focus on the agents on the streets below with some familiarity. In fact, to each of them, these lawyers looked all too familiar. Too easy to dismiss them as an illusion or allusion. Too simple to keep them as myth. Their familiarity makes Sorrow tremble, her eyes want to avert, want to forget.  “Their shadows swallow children and destitute, like they slipped down a drain into the heart of the city. 

“Makes me wonder what my painkillers are made of.” The dwarf half-jokes, still keened on the halfling of the group. “Maybe I don’t wanna know.”

“They’re bad news.” The woman with the rifle stands from her position. She turns towards the rooftop door. “Let's be worse.”

Sorrow looks over to her companions. The dwarf grows a smile and racks his gun. Stu’s faceplate gives nothing away, but his lights flicker in contentment. She sees them walking towards the door, sees them walking into that ruinous death that waits below. Above them, a crow flies and disappears in a sunbeam. She turns back towards the crowd and is shocked to not be able to see them any more. Somehow, she feels as if all four of those agents are behind her, feels the ghost of their hands around her shoulders and around her neck. Not seeing them is worse than knowing where they are.

Sorrow stands up, the hem of her dress catching on the rough stone of the parapet. As if it is demanding, begging her to stay here. Stay where it is safe, do not go, it will miss you. She doesn’t notice, of course. And as she stands up, it rips the fabric, tears part of the dress that her husband bought. It even tears her skin slightly, so hastily did she move. As her hand reaches the door, as she hears the echoes of her companions down the metal stairway into the unknown and abyss, the first gunshot cracks from across the pavilion. From the sound of it, it is unknown who fired. Not even I know. The fabric still caught on the rough stone blows gently in the breeze. There is screaming, and more gunfire. She hesitates at the door frame. 

Then another crack of lead, of the bullet singing across the air and the fire. She looks back towards the parapet she stood on and sees the fabric fluttering gently in the wind, beckoning one last time to return. To be safe here, with the entirety of the dress. To sow it back on and forget this place. To allow herself the whole of her grief, not to segment it into parts that might be more palatable.

She, however, does not listen. And so, Sorrow begins her walk down.

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Have you ever smelt burning, dear reader?

I mean true burning. Burning without purpose. Not a fire to warm, not a stove to heat, not even a hearth to commiserate over. In each of those cases, there is something else to obstruct the smell. Camaraderie, love, compassion. The fire becomes a vector for those things. but those emotions, those acts, dilute the power of fire. Make it something comfortable, something that you can keep as a pet. You can keep it in a hearth or in a pilot light, flickering gently forever 

But strip that away, what do you have? Flames and tinder. Pure, primal entropy. The wood takes on certain smells when burnt, of course, but even the way the fire catches the air has a smell to it. It dances along the tongue, fills your head with heat. It is intoxicating and vicious. It fills the blood with carbon, turns your thoughts to sludge and to ruin. It is the smell of the desperation of fire, how it is so keen to injure, so keen to spread and to consume.

They say fire has no will of its own. That it is a chemical force, a rapid oxidation. It is a process, the act of transformation between states of being. That it doesn’t dance, that it doesn’t entrance or beckon. You can understand it, that it is a causal relationship. That fire starts when a flash point is hit, when coalescing forces act upon a fuel. The tinder of inequity, a long standing dryness of monarchist sentiment, and an abundance of rage being the oxidizer. And trust me, dear reader, there was plenty of rage to be had. All such a tinderbox would need is a spark, a flash where these things combine into conflagration, into inferno. A gunshot. A boot on the neck. A child screaming just a bit too loud. Any of these things could spark. Any of these things did spark before.

And yet, all of that ignores the temporality of fire. The moments before such a burning incur the penalty of the flames. The smell of sawdust on the air, the feeling of dry that hangs like a mist. The way the wind shifts, how it blows errant sparks. How the rifle looks in the hands of the man in front of you. How anger dries the grass. The area around something that is to be burnt is saturated with it. Fire is causal, this is what they tell you. Because causality is easy, because there is an event that follows a combination of sources. It allows for dissection, it allows for change. Move the oily rags away from the fireplace, caution against rage and against anger. Do these things next time, and fire will not happen. 

It takes away any purpose, any drive from the tinder. It takes away agency from those who kept the tinder dry enough to begin with. It brings the issue with the fire itself, not with the things that precipitated it. It points a finger at flame and says “there, kill it. There, snuff it out.” Ignoring what fire wants to do, ignoring that fire is the will of fuel, the desire to process and to change forms. It denies that the things that burn may have needed to in the first place. 

Fire wants to burn.

Given enough time, it will find any excuse to do so. It will creep into the walls, it will creep into the fields or into the forests. Because the things we do, the things necessary for such an improvement, are both antecedent and subsequent of fire. Progress invites it in, growth invites it in. We need to respect that, allow different outlets for such inferno. Allow the flames to burn into something productive. This lesson is one Mariposa did not learn. 

One that Sorrow Brightwind refused to learn.

The streets she rushed out into were choked with that pre-fire. The air was thick with rage, so sickly sweet was it that you could taste it on your tongue. The sky had, as if it were ablaze itself, caught in streaks of bright orange and yellow, despite the fact it was perhaps no later than three in the afternoon. The clouds above churned in ways that made it clear no rain was in sight. They swirled like they were saturated with soot and with char, like they were caught in the updraft of some grand conflagration, some world burning flame. 

The streets were arush with anger. The gunshots echoed throughout the brick buildings, although seemingly none of them were followed with any more loosening of lead. There was screaming, of course. There was yelling, both to and from the jackboots who were tightening the noose. Sorrow looked around the now frantic crowd, desperately searching for her companions who were not three steps ahead of her just a moment before. It looks as if the kettle that they were so concerned about twenty minutes prior had been more a premonition than paranoia. The people around her were a mix of anger, frustration, and fear. Nearby, a jackboot brings a rifle down against a man's head. He cries out as a tooth is cracked on the ground. He doesn’t even know who fired the first shot. Nearby, a child looks around, scared, for her mother. Nearby, a person is shouting expletives in Algeran as iron handcuffs are placed around their wrists. Nearby, thousands of different inequities happen all at once. Tinder, waiting to be sparked. 

“Isosa, please.” Sorrow muttered, her own thoughts drowned out by the yelling. She could hear herself clear, though. Razor keened, through the noxious smell of the pre-ash around her. “Please, a safe place.” It is all she could choke out around the ash that soon is to fill her lungs.

She looks up, tries to see the Concordat of Miracles from here. Tries to see that feral angel which at any and all points in Mariposa could be seen. She fails, dear reader. All she can see is the screaming, eternal horizon. And so she runs, she pushes through the crowd, deeper and deeper into the kettle. She can hear less and less of the jackboots, a fact that should comfort her. Perhaps there is a place further on where they are not, perhaps there is a place where she could break through. One of the sandals from her foot falls away, either burning away or snapping under the immense strain, but she continues. Pushing past the wailing, churning mass of humanity before her. She feels their warmth, she feels the wetness of their sweat and their tears on her shoulders. And she grips her hand tighter in vigilance. There is a safe place, she is sure.

Across the courtyard, she hears it. The inchoate choir of Mariposa, the voice of kommos, the voice of scorn. “See how they hunt us?” The voice says, as if the city herself is speaking. The crowd grunts in agreement, even Sorrow feels an affirmation escape her lips as she walks, so caught in the zeal was she. “See how they starve and beat us? It is a cowardice, too scared to fight a foe at their strength. Too scared to act beyond laws and dictates, too scared to see Mariposa at it's proudest.”

It is as if the voice changes the movement of the people, as soon as those words escape the roiling, churning chaos everything has a purpose. The men with arms turn towards the spire, the women with weapons break into a sprint. People of all walks of life, all Mariposian’s now, turn towards the horizon and see just one thing. The spire of San Berandine University. The Spire where, for hundreds of years, knowledge and riches have coalesced from all corners of the world. The Spire where it had books on music and love and war that none of them would ever read. The Spire where the corporate lords who make up the board of the university would meet and be served little cakes on little trays where just six blocks down a woman starved to death six times over. The Spire where the suffering of war was arbitrary and hypothetical. The Spire where Dr. Fleur sat on the board of directors. 

In a moment, every eye that could see that Spire knew what it was built upon. From the Jackboot to the Unionboys to Stolynn himself, every mind was a rush and burdened with that divine, horrible knowledge of suffering. That every person, if for a moment, is understanding of what has been hoarded there. Every mind knew for an instant the call of the void.

Then the air catches fire.

As if from nowhere, as if the old maxims of Mariposa were true, every rioter draws weapon. Pistols and rifles and knives and bits of wood and bats and clubs and swords and rifles. They were not armed at the start of the demonstration, not so much so that every man, woman, and child could produce such violence in a moment's notice. But I am sure, sure as anything dear reader, that those weapons appeared from nothing but pure might. That will mixed with metal so harsh and true that not even I could tell by the end which was there at the beginning of the day and which was not.

 They shown in the light of the fire that now adorned their hands, and cracks of sickening violence rung out from the crowd. Pinging projectiles off the bricks and ricocheting chaos, a bat comes down onto the skull of an Imperial Jackboot. Hands erupt in flame as nearby windows and passersby get caught up in the cacophony of  the movement. There are screams, there is blood to be spilled. To call it infectious is to downplay the severity of the transmission. It did not spread from person to person, it did not slowly trickle into the water and into the minds of the rioters. 

It was a flashpoint, an instantaneous reaction of oxidizer, fuel, and pain. In a single moment, every mind was coalesced into one, sublimating rage. To move towards the San Bernadine Tower. To take up, hand in hand with the person next to you, and burn that tower to the ground. To lock arms and move forward.

Even Sorrow, frail in spirit, felt the call. Her hands tightening in rage, her teeth grinding so hard she feels dust in the back of her mouth. She feels the sweat and the heat of the flames lapping at the back of her mind. It is all she can do to not look at that tower, which was set against a dower, hateful sun. She knew if she did, if she were to lift her eyes towards the building, there would be no going back, there would be no stopping her fists from balling in absent flame. Her eyes were shut tight, pushing through the undulating, swarming crowd. Tears were sublimating on her cheek as she felt it. Felt the watch of that tower. Felt it's call. It sounded like the voice of angels, a plurality of sharpness and razors edge song. Come, Sorrow my child. Burn me. Burn me down. How many people had heard that call? How many saw rebirth in it? Saw the sun rising instead of setting? 

How many, dear reader, saw dusk and thought of dawn?

The sky above was awash with streaks of lavender and rose, like the fingers of Mariposa were screaming against it, tearing into its sweet, supple flesh. The towering citadels of Mariposian progress stretched past the clouds, carving long streaks of shadowing into the sky. Each was basking in that rising sun, each a towering inferno waiting to happen. The voices around Sorrow were maddening, their chants and screams and pleas of no more each beckoning her into that open dawn, beckoning her into some kind of rebirth. A glass shatters next to her. A foot falls a little too hard. Empyrial voices yell some kind of slur. Sorrow is running, far and fast, from that rising, burning, terrible sun. She ran, ducking under arms and weaving between bodies with a sense that she had never felt before. The heat around her radiated so strongly that she could feel the edges of each person in the crowd. Even bereft of her sense, she knew just when to duck, when to move to the side, when to crawl to avoid its flames. She ran for what felt like hours. She ran as gunshots whizzed around her, as she heard a scream of wounded and as she felt the flames grow higher and higher. She ran so fast that, when she did come to a stop, when the bridge of her foot hit a brick lip, it sent her tumbling into cool, still water. 

Sorrow gasped as the chill hit her skin, letting the stagnant water into her mouth. She quickly raised her head, opened her eyes, and breathed a sigh of relief. It was her reflection. Sorrow was staring back into herself, and that was a sight she could trust. And then, the blood trickled in. And she looked up to see where she was. 

 It is a small fountain that has since stopped running. Each of the rioters had their back turned, too preoccupied with their own movement, with their own heat and warmth. It was an eye, a stillness, a fountain dedicated to one of the deans of the past. Marble, sculpted with precision and grace. The water had stopped flowing from the statue, leaving only the pool in the basin to slowly be drained. The air was getting dryer, the water was steaming. Pushed against the statue was a jackboot. His helmet was shattered, his hand was clasped around an injury, his chest falling up and down, up and down, up and down in steady, belabored breath. His armor was at least a quarter of an inch thick, and yet it looked torn like paper, buckled in and mixing with his viscera. The fabric of the garment he wore was seared onto his skin at the point of impact, metal jutting out into flesh, tearing and rending it for every moment onwards. For a moment, it is just the two of them. It is the first time Sorrow has seen an Imperial without a helmet on.

She imagined them as beasts. As barbarians with painted faces and piercings, with slavering teeth and blood stained eyes. He was not that. He was a young man from Karnata, with sandy skin and scared, angry eyes. He grimaced through the pain and scowled at her. He wanted to spit, but found his mouth too dry, his lips cracked and flowing with blood.

“I can’t die here.” He mutters in Empyrial. “Not in. This fucking disgusting.” He coughs, slumping against the statue a bit harder for support. The marble cracks. Bits of stone fall into the basin, splashing the both of them with the mixture of ichor and water. “Not here, not in this. Place.”

“I don’t- I don’t know.” Sorrow says, her eyes drenched with compassion. “What are you saying? How can I help?”

And then, Sorrow blinks. Or maybe it was a bit of ash. Or maybe, for a moment, she was distracted by another gunshot. The crowd begins to move around the fountain, still not looking at the two of them inside. Towards the tower. The screaming has turned to yelling now. Somewhere, someone strikes a match to light a cigarette. It was a noise that keened Sorrow’s senses, allowing her to focus on only the surrounding thirty feet. And when she opens her eyes, when that brief moment of respite ends, there is another person.

He is standing in the basin with them, his black slacks rolled up around his shins and his standard issue black loafers, polished and unscuffed, are placed beside the fountain on the rim. In his hand, an E-99 oscillating revolver hums gently with his bioluminescence, as if the two of them are oscillating in time. His skin is a deep, violent purple. His hair, or what Sorrow thinks is his hair, is almost blue, that is how white it is. It almost absorbs light, refracts it into hues that were hitherto unseen by any Brightwind that has ever existed. He looks peaceful and his back is turned towards Sorrow. The barrel of his revolver emanates so much heat that the water a couple feet below it is sublimating almost, shimmering in mirage just above the waterline. 

He was not standing here a moment before, and yet he looked as inanimate as the statue he stands in front of. A vily, dressed in a full black suit. Sorrow gasps, although whether it was from his sudden intrusion into this reality or from an understanding of who he was is not known. Heat creeps around him, stilling all movement from the air. It is both hot and cool, it is both still and active. He turns his head to look at her, his eyes peering over his shoulder. She remembers them being white, like he was blind. She remembers how starkly they contrasted with the violet of his skin, how it felt important to remember how they shifted slightly with his bioluminescence.

Then, she remembers how the light flittered back into them. How, he appeared as if he was flooding back into his own body. And then, she remembers how he opened his mouth to speak, how wide and full of teeth it was.

“Well.” The vily agent said in a voice that sounded too kind for him. He fully turned around, his short, cropped hair tousled slightly in the breeze. “Aren’t you a frail thing.” The words sounded more cruel than the man was capable of. Sorrow tried to take a step back, but her feet found the edge of the fountain. The vily agent looked down at the body behind him, at his straining feet attempting to find purchase.

“I um, really should go.” It was all Sorrow could muster. Behind her the crowd was churning, an impenetrable wall of fearful flesh. “My husband.” The words felt unfamiliar, unfortunate, in her mouth. “He’s waiting. For me.”

From across the courtyard, from towards the spire, a single, booming voice rings out. It is as if the crowd all turns at once towards it. The movement stops. The churning, miserable heat does not. “Mariposians!” It says, it's accent is laden with thick brogue. Sorrow was unable to pick out who was saying what. It took all her focus to keep the vily in front of her, it blocked out the rest of the world. Everything around her was churning, incoherent flames. The sky turned orange and even the tower, with all it's stained glass, shown in a brilliant, warm light. “How dare this tower be used for anything but the bricks in our house ever again?

The vily pocketed his gun in his vest and extended his unarmed hand, as if the person behind him did not just breath one last, ragged, sputtering breath. He looked over towards his shoes. He was calm. He was peaceful, even in the heat of this raging inferno. His face seemed almost sad, and just a bit too kind. The vily reminded Sorrow of a paladin she once knew, back on the coast. She was a little girl and she had not yet met her husband. Both were composed, both were wiry and both had that little hook in their noses. 

He looked trustworthy. Like a web, enticing and mooring in the chaos of the winds. “I can take you to him, miss.” The vily says, extending a cool hand. His hair blows gently in the wind, an errant ash lands on his brow. He is a deep purple. The water is draining around his feet. “This place is not safe for you.”

She understood that as a threat, dear reader. How could she not? The way he moved betrayed his intention. Her eyes could not be taken off of them, like beasts that the body instinctively knows to be dangerous. Like wolves, circling the flock. Like in a moment, she could be whisked away to where her pain and misery would be a mystery to everyone, that she could be so thoroughly forgotten and expunged from history that not even I could write about it. It would be no great sacrifice, no great martyr. She would not even give Oflay the chance to perform the Rappelles Toi. If she were to vanish, all she would leave in her wakes were what ifs and might have beens, theories to be pondered, agonized over, but never solved. 

Oflay would never tell herself “it should have been you” if Sorrow disappeared that way. There would be no knives of grief that the survivors could keen into some sort of direction. No weapons of sorrow to be forged. She fought the urge to take a step forward, into that oblivion. Something of this crowd, it forewarned her own death. She saw it everywhere. She saw it on the crows that perched above, she saw it in the muddy, sunken reflections in this fountain. Ever since she had emerged from that room, the room where her husband lay, all she could see was corpsed. And, by the grand weft of Isosa herself, she found herself at the feet of the San Bernadine Spire. She had been swept up in the zeal of movement, of direction, that she had found herself in perdition, in predation. If she is gunned down here, in the dirty violent streets of Mariposa, she leaves behind grief, she leaves behind purpose to be lived up to. She leaves behind more death in her name.

Without thought, Sorrow began to move, her body lurched forward towards, almost tumbling over itself in its attempt at forward. The vily smiled as her feet moved through the brackish water.

But, in oblivion, she leaves nothing behind. Not samsara, not memories, not grief. Sorrow would leave nothing behind and that is a gift she could never give her daughter otherwise. She could give her peace, in the wailing, gnashing siren song of the Fleurs. She could give Oflay peace. It called to Sorrow, urging her to take a step forward into those waiting teeth. 

Peace. 

Smoke builds around them, but Sorrow can not see it. The water was so, so cold. The rioters scream, unaware of who is in their midst. The fires rise, the wet, ashy heat surrounds them. The vily extended his non-dominant hand. The bioluminescence flickering under his skin seemed to call to her, seemed familiar. He opened his mouth to speak again, perhaps to summon her home. His other hand reached towards his gun.

At last, peace.

“Don’t you dare fucking touch her, freak!”

And, the moment is shattered. 

The woman with the rifle breaks through the roiling crowd, her feet splashing the fountain’s water across the both of them. Her nose is broken. Her breath is shallow. Sorrow fell backwards from the sheer force of the woman with the rifle landing between the two of them. The hem of her dress is now soaked, the water more muddy than she had thought it was. The sun shown behind the woman with the rifle’s head, haloing her in a beautiful, deadly aurora. Corona’s of light shooting around and through her updone hair. The rifle was in her hand by its forearm, its barrel red and hot and blisteringly white. It bent slightly in the heat, making its operation impossible. Visera and dents now marked the stock. 

Her mouth dripped with blood.

Sorrow looked upon her with reverence and with fear. “Stolynn?” She muttered, questioning who was in front of her. The haze of the air marred her sense, allowing her to see what she wanted to see. By the time Sorrow recognized the woman with the rifle, she was already moving again, swiveling the rifle down against the vily assassin. 

The vily swept right, his bare feet knocking his loafers into the fountain. He looked down at them with a grimace. The rifle just barely misses him. The woman it was holding lets out a grunt, a growl, a choice expletive or two. The agent balanced on the fountain’s edge, revolver in his hand. “Now miss, was that exactly necessary?” He asked, as if more annoyed by the inconvenience of the wet shoes. “The leather wasn’t cheap, after all. And I didn’t take you for one to waste.”

The woman with the rifle grunted in response, dropping her shoulders low, her arms hanging limp. The rifle was still gripped tightly in her hands, the makeshift warhammer still ready for violence. She breaks into a sprint and lashes back out against the assassin. Water sprays between the two of them. Brackish, muddy, roiling. A bolt of heat lightning flashes for a moment against the water. The air on Sorrow’s tongue is thick. It is laden. It is leadened. Ash and bile mix in the back of her throat. She tries to get to her feet.

She fails.

The vily jumps back into the fountain, only dodging the rifle’s swing by inches. He levels his revolver at where he thinks the woman with the rifle will be. Sorrow can almost see the calculations in his head of barrel drift and velocity. It is in the way his eyes dart between beads of water, it is in the way his eyes shift in measurements of micrometers, it is in the way his body tilts to align perfectly with the barrel of his revolver. The woman with the rifle has no such grace, no such precision. So, when tactically it would have been smart to keep to his right as the vily predicts, she keeps on his left. She is on the same side as his revolver. If he were to pull the trigger at this moment, it would pierce her heart. It would stop her.

He continues turning right for a moment too long. And by the time his synapses realize she is not keeping out of his line of fire, by the time his mind realizes she is doing the opposite of what he expects, the action potential has been reached. His cells polarize. His muscles contract. His body moves in spite of him. His hand squeezes. The gun goes off. And it misses his target. 

The woman with the rifle can barely hear the shot go off over the pounding of blood in her ears, nor does she have the wherewithal to properly understand that a gun has been shot in the first place. She can only focus on the reflection of herself and Sorrow in the vily’s pearlescent eyes. It is difficult to keep her focus on him, as if he is trying to slide from off of her eyes. Her mind reels, she sees pure movement. The edges of her body burn away. Her skin is alight with rage. Every sense she can feel at that moment razor keens onto a single, burning idea.

She needs to hurt this man.

Hurting him is all she can do at this moment. Hurting him gives Sorrow a chance to escape. Hurting him gives her a chance to survive. Hurting him will heal Mariposa. Hurting him will feel so good. She needs to hurt him in every way that him and his kind have hurt. Her feet hit the stone of the fountain, now almost completely having sublimated away. A shock of purpose surges through her muscles. They tear. They rend. They put every inch of power, every single thought and idea, into this single, perfect swing. The rifle arcs through the air. A building catches fire. Plasma arcs between the molecules of air. The air itself screams and singles in immolate, beautiful rage. This woman was made for this.

Hurting him will feel so good.

“Stop it!” 

The voice is almost childlike. It cuts through the air, it cuts through the flames and through the blood and pierces the woman with the rifle’s mind itself. It reminds her of her daughter, the one she left behind in Rishi. It reminds her of smoldering. And of faint wind blowing and of hungry nights. The rifle continues its arc, there is no stopping that movement now. But without that focus, with the woman’s concentration shattered, she is no longer exactly sure of the agent’s place here. Doubt creeps in. And the rifle hits the stone lip of the fountain. The wood finally gives in and shatters. The water has now completely drained from the basin. She turns towards the voice in desperation and in concern and sees Sorrow sitting there, back against the fountain’s edge. 

Her dress is dripping with the now drained water. Her face is pale, her mouth open in fear. The edges of Sorrow’s nails are stained with her own blood from how hard they dig into the stone. She is trembling, quivering even. She looks even more like her daughter than anytime before.

“Please, do not hurt him.” Sorrow manages to get out. “I… I think I know him.” Her mouth is dripping with fear. The woman with the rifle just stands there, agast. The rifle now broken, dashed against the stonework. Her face is unreadable to Sorrow. I know it is disgust, dear reader. Confusion and disgust. That is a secret I keep close. To ever know what that face looks like. Her hands drop the rifle into the now dry, burning fountain.

“What do you mean-” is all the woman can manage before the vily assassin sticks his boot knife between the T10 and T11 of the vertebral column. Her legs give out, the signals of her brain firing in all directions. The agent twists his knife, left instead of right this time. His arm wraps around her waist almost delicately, holding her upright as he shifts the knife up further into her diaphragm. He can hear the blood beginning to fill her thoracic cavity. He can feel her blood drip down the hilt of his knife and onto his wrist. Sorrow sees his eyes again. And they are devoid of light.

“You’re right, brother.” The vily says to no one in particular. “An unforeseen event indeed.”

The woman without the rifle grabs onto the vily’s arm like he is leading a dance. She tilts her head back towards his. He cradles her as her knees continue to fail her. 

“Why?” She manages to get out between bloody gurgles. She looks back at Sorrow. “Why?”

“Shush shush shush.” He places his hand on her forearm. His fingers are stained with blood. “You’ll bleed out faster. And no one wants that.”

The woman without the rifle meets Sorrow’s eyes, her head falls down limply. It is all she can do to make sure Sorrow sees her one last time. And Sorrow does not see disgust this time. She does not see hatred or anger. Merely peace. Sorrow swears she almost sees a smile.

And then the air catches fire.

Sorrow begins to cry, but the tears evaporate upon meeting her verdant skin. Her blood begins to glow, her hair begins to fray and singe and light like dry tinder. Sorrow grips the stonework even tighter, clenched her teeth even harder. The adrenalin, the hatred, it fills her veins. Suffuses her with an absent flame. Her body begins to tremble. The vily agent begins to back away with the woman without the rifle’s limp body in his hands. He doesn’t even realize what she is doing. His first foot enters the crowd. She knows, dear reader. She knows if she does not act now he will disappear with her. He will take her with her and she will become myth. 

And she can not allow that to happen.

Her eyes keen on the woman without the rifle’s chest. Her eyes keen past that, through her towards the center of the Fleur Agent himself. And she begins to draw her pistol from her belt. A pistol she did not have. A pistol that was made from absent flame and from will. A pistol she knows beyond knowing that she will own soon. She attempts to draw her pistol from the future. The space around her hands crack like a mirror. The world stands still. She is handing it to herself. Her hand almost finds purchase on its ivory. Just a bit more, she thinks. Her fingers ghost the cold metal of the trigger. She continues to draw it, her arms moving in spite of herself. She needs to save her, Sorrow lies to herself. This is all to save her.

Then she sees the woman without the rifle’s smile. She thinks herself a paladin. As high and as mighty as those who protect Isosa from the vile and the monstrous. She has saved Sorrow, even if Sorrow had killed her in doing so. It is in the way her eyes fall. It is the way her lips tremble. It is in the way her hands do not grab at stones, the way her legs do not kick. The flames lick at the back of Sorrow’s hand as the pistol now enters into her line of sight. 

The woman without the rifle is a Mariposian. She is a rebellion against her goddess, who basks in the anathema of feral angels. She is a worker who toils and builds things. She is someone who hurts others, who betrays order for the sake of mercy. 

Mercy. 

The most vile of the vices.

Her face is wrapt in anger, the flames crowd the edges of her eyes. The Spire in the distance, begins to burn. A book turns to ash almost instantly. The woman without the rifle, what does she seek? To be the one who gives mercy? To take whatever place Sorrow might have? Sorrow’s finger finds the trigger and it cuts her. She bleeds flame. Her hands are shaking, threatening to pull the gun apart. It is fragile. It is fleeting. Who does she think she is, to bring herself as high as to protect her? To replace her in the arms of peace? The vily offers obliteration and the woman without the rifle would STEAL IT FROM HER!

Sorrow’s eyes find the woman’s heart. It is beating. Loud. True. It is alight with every vice that has been beaten into Sorrow. Mercy, sacrifice, obligation. Her veins are alight with the aspect of the Wolf, as this whole city is. The Miracle. It hangs low above the city. Sorrow can feel its eyes on her. Engulfing her. Urging her. Destroy her. It beckons. Burn her down. Anathema. I lay upon her anathema. Sorrow, it beckons, the trigger. You can feel it. 

Her sights are upon the woman’s heart. The vily pulls her deeper into the crowd. The time is fleeting, Sorrow. Anathema. She curls her finger around the trigger. The blood flows. It is flame. Anathema. She stole what Sorrow needed, what Oflay needed. The end, it is quickening. She can hear the riotous drums. The roil of the crowd. They are moving away from her, towards something new. Sorrow is staying still. Sorrow is staying murderously still. She is dead already, Sorrow. This is just. Anathema. 

Anathema. 

ANATHEMA.

Weakness.

It is a moment of pure weakness that keeps Sorrow from pulling the trigger. 

It is the moment between heartbeats, between seconds. Sorrow is back on the rooftop. Sorrow is back in the march. Sorrow feels the woman without the rifle’s hand on her back. Sorrow can hear Stolynn’s chants. It creeps in between the flames. It intersperses passion and fills her blood with sympathy. With sentimentality. Her eyes catch the fleeting smile. Her strong hands. Her laugh.

And her gun falls apart.

She tries to pull the trigger. It is not there. The rage is gone, leaving only bitter hollow on Sorrow’s tongue. Resentment, maybe. Disgust, certainly. But not rage. Not the furious anger needed to summon such a weapon. She tries to bring it back, to bear the absent flame once more. She bites her tongue, draws blood. She tries, dear reader. She tries to force her mind into that blade again, to keen herself as a weapon against someone who slights her. All she tastes is blood. 

The woman without the rifle disappears into the crowd. Sorrow had but a moment to enact Isosa’s will, to become like the paladins she admired. And she faltered. She looks up towards the Concordat of Miracles. It has turned away from her, keeping its forced vigil on the city of Mariposa. The sky is ablaze. She smells burning knowledge. Her hands are slick with blood. It is cold. Anathema.

A voice is heard emerging from the crowd and Sorrow snaps towards it. She tries to draw the gun again, this time not even thinking about it. She fails, of course. But she levels it against the voice all the same. Her fingers do not hesitate this time, finding what would have been the trigger.

She would have killed whatever it pointed at.

She would have killed the man standing in front of her. 

He is tall. His horns are sawn off and constantly bleeding. He is flanked on either side by a dwarf and a mechanized man. His own gun is pointing at the ground. He flinches when he hears her hammer click into place. He knows he is not safe.

It is Stolynn standing before her. He is a bastion of Mariposa. Large and furrowed brow. He looks down at her. She is still pulling the trigger, cycling the cylinder of a gun that has never existed. Her hands are dripping with blood. He extends a hand out towards her. She does not, she never does, take it.

The cylinder is still cycling. Click, click, click. They stand there for all too long. The wind howls between them, cut through by the cold, mechanical clicking of a gun that just isn't there.

“Are you alright, miss?” He asks. The gun is still firing dry. Sulfur and ash fill the air. The sky is still burning. His hand is trembling before her, flinching at every trigger pull.

She does not stop firing. Click. Her hands are dripping with cold blood. Click. Her voice is ragged with barely constrained rage. 

Click.

“It should have been me.”

[cupoftrembling]

Provocateur

“It should have been you.”

These bitter, cruel words have been said an uncountable number of times. Trust me dear reader, I have tried. It was my first undertaking, before attempting to reconcile the history of the war in Mariposa: to catalog the things that wound, the words and events that drag us into the muck of vile emotion. A book of past indiscretions, both mine and everyone else's. The first time I heard them rang as cruel as the most recent, and they have been hurled at me more times than I could count. 

There is something of an art to wishing harm on another, and there are certainly a lot of ways to do so. You could condemn them to justice, you can harm and injure with reckless abandon. The people of the Shattered Planes are adept in injury, and there are more than one way to kill. But to come to an event where you have to mutter such cruelties? To hate, deep and as true as sunlight, is common. Boring. Just as common is to weep for injustice dealt to the undeserving. An entire war was fought for these injustices, a war that shattered the sky and killed Gods, because a mother lost her children far too young. But the conflux of them? To hate so truly that you wish an injustice done that was committed towards someone innocent? To wish upon them a different type of pain, to injure them with a thought, because these words are not said to some stranger. Someone who slights you, large or small, does not conjure such hatred. This wish only takes root when there is some other pain to compare the suffering of your target towards.

I am sure these words are familiar to you, dear reader. That somewhere, someone who had trusted you, someone who had loved you had said these words to you. That the acidity of their voice, the venom of their words seared off the top layer of your mind. A lover, a child, a parent. I can not say whether or not you deserved it. I hope you didn’t.  And if you didn’t, I am sorry, truly and sorrowfully. If you did, I can only hope that, somewhere, some sort of justice prevailed. That you understood enough of pain to change, to try and effect some difference on yourself.

Or maybe, and if this is the case I truly am sorry, you are stuck in a horrible juxtaposition. You both did and did not deserve it. That somewhere, deep in you, you knew that it was cruel to lob such vitriol towards you, even if in your heart of hearts knew that you hurt someone. Stuck in the liminal space of attempting to better yourself while also defending your ego. A superposition of injury, where one might not take fault but still feel the burn and sting of venom. Where the words echo across your mind, where even an image, a scent, a sound can conjure the memory of that pain.

Where, like Sorrow Brightwind, you catch your eye in your own reflection, and you hear those words in your own voice.

The first time she had heard her own mind tell her such awful cruelties was three weeks after the fire. She was in that little flower shop down Le Marc street, the one with the towering Vily with the soft hands. Above her, an imperial war balloon floated gently and she had thought, in that moment, she could feel the gun pointed at her. Feel the marksman adjusting his scope. Her verdant skin caught the sun, her horns were backswept and aerodynamic. She was the pinnacle of cambion beauty, in which she would have been revered and adored as a temple goddess some years prior on the coasts. However, she toyed idly with a pair of twisted stag horns, denoting a different kind of servility. The gold was cool to the skin, tamping down the infernal heat of Mrs. Brightwinds’ heritage. 

She was, as well, dangerously thin. Her eyes were sunken and slightly bulged, her fingers shook with hunger, the crust of sick was crusted over on the edge of her mouth. Her hair, nestled beautifully in a bun between her horns, was greasy and covered in flyaways. She still moved in her traditional, graceful ways, as her feet more ghosted the cobblestones of the Lower Wards than they did traverse them. However, each step felt more and more unsure, not yet bordering on nervous or tedious. It seemed, as if for the first time in her life, that the composure was taking a considerable effort, kept only with a white knuckled grip.

To the more militant and faithful, this would be an unusual sight, a graceful gait the  demarcation of a successful Rappeles Toi. The weakness in the body is the mark of the strength of spirit, that one was able to survive treachery and biological peril. However, to Mariposa and her citizens who feast on grief, Sorrow looked just like any number of debtors and renters that crowd the streets.. Starved, frail, she took to the streets like so many of her now kin, homeless and penniless in the wake of Imperial victory. The sun above caught the Concordat of Miracles, casting Sorrow in shadow. The wings, all six thousand and twelve of them, strained against the iron rivetsrivulets  and silver nails that that a litigious grin placed. A halo, a purely Mariposian invention of servility, obscured a set of its eyes. Sorrow had heard the story of Queen Mariposa the Litigious and the First Miracle. The thing above the city was barely more than a feral angel, thousands of years of imprisonment and time had eroded any sense of mind or thought, obliterated the higher thinking and connection to the Grand Weft of Order.

And yet, why could she not shake the feeling that it was watching her? Why could she sense, even here on unhallowed ground, that her God was watching her every stumble and impetuous motion? She stopped in the center of Le Marc street to attempt to get a better look at the Concordat, but found her eyes unable to focus on it, found the sun behind it too blinding, too painful to completely stare into.

The street was busy, of course. The Lower Wards, through war or famine, were always packed. They were, naturally, the most populous parts of the city. Where all sorts of underthings and beastfolks congregate with those who powered and ran the city. Obviously, the Lower Wards were where the industry was conducted, where things that were manufactured from imported materials would be constructed, packaged, and shipped out. The air was heavy with industry, with song,with chants and signs. Above, much like Sorrow had intuited, three imperial sharpshooters surveilled the scene. From their vantage, above the city, the people flowed like water. They moved around obstacles, chanting in rushing waves, and, most importantly, they seemed almost organic, uncoordinated and yet synchronous in their movements. The torches and the signs they carried, things that denoted them as living and feeling individuals with autonomy and rationale, got lost in the scope of it all. They seemed almost like a natural force, like something to be overcome. Like the frost beaten away with shelter, like a river diverted with a dyke. Mariposa, the blood that flowed in the people and in her streets, was not fully to be understood, at least to those three sharpshooters, each cracking jokes about taking out a flower pot above the head of one of the rioters. They were inhuman -- beasts to be tamed, to be beaten and broken.

Sorrow saw the same flower pot that the imperial sharpshooters saw, saw a cambion man lifting a child onto his shoulders to steal a petal from it. And yet, she found that the distance did not change that thought in her mind. Mariposa, the people who lived in it, relied on that baser sense. They ate, they slept, they reacted, they marched. Reactionary was the Mariposa. The corporate lords didn’t fully understand the Grand Weft of Order, nor diddo the proletariat marching here. And yet, even with the same Imperial mindset, she glanced upwards, towards the snipers and scowled. 

Sorrow walked these streets for hours. Her mother did not expect her back for some time. The young Oflay was enough to deal with, Sorrow was sure of that. After her Rappeles Toi ended, after she emerged from that room, covered in tears and scratches and faith, Madam Brightwind insisted she get some air, insisted that she get some of the city in her. Sorrow had hoped that it would clear her mind, which was like the keen blade of a razor  after two weeks of careful, mournful contemplation. Rappeles Toi had that effect on the religious. It was a fasting of all sensations, from where a different person emerges, if they emerge at all. Isosa demands that her followers honor those who are lost by making those left behind think of nothing else. Not food, not sunlight, not sleep or water or warmth or family. For two weeks, your grief subsumes you, for which there can be no comfort.

Many did not survive their first Rappeles Toi. Even fewer survive their second. It was always described as an act of honor, a rapturous event where you flay off the skin of grief and emerge, renewed and reborn. Theologians of Isosa talk of the zeal of hunger, how contemplation and reverence allows the sadness to flow through you, allowing one access to truer, purer emotions that are otherwise denied to you by petty physical realities such as hunger or love. That the sorry ways of grief practiced by the other cultures left marks on the body and on the soul, whereas this purification, this castigation allowed for the sorrow to slough off of you. It was a better way to heal. Hearing them speak, I was almost convinced of it myself. The way they were so right, so sure of themselves made me doubt what little I knew of suffering. It was in the eyes, a brightening flame of devotion that even they did not realize was truly burning. 

Sorrow had no such zeal about her. She ghosted the city streets of Mariposa with no reverence, with no renewal. Her shoulders were heavy, free of any absolution. Her arms were clutched around her waist, hands on either one of her elbows in an attempt to keep out the chill. Around her, the city bustled in its grief. The man she passed sitting on the gutter held a pink slip in his hand. A crescent and sword, symbols of the newly nationalized businesses by the Empire of Night, was stamped on his termination. A woman walked beside Sorrow, a rifle slung openly in front of her. It was her husband’s, once, and she had never fired it in her life. Sorrow looked her in the eyes and nodded, not a word exchanged between the two. A child, no older than Oflay, sat on the shoulders of what Sorrow could only assume was her grandfather. A stout man, missing an eye and half of his teeth. Her parents were nowhere to be seen. 

Was this, too, a Rappeles Toi? A national mourning, felt by every single man in Mariposa?

Sorrow was not a grand theologian, nor philosopher. She did not idle herself with petty reasonings and arguing about the grand weft of Isosa. At least, she hadn’t before. But here, she found herself walking with them, unaware of where they were truly going. A procession through the streets of the Lower Wards, galvanized by something they were unaware of. And that thought could not leave her, could not escape the barbed wire of her mind, its limbs tangled and snagged by the razors keened by her hunger and sadness. That these people, a civilization often derided by adherents of Isosa, are themselves sloughing off something.

“Where are we going?” Sorrow finally found the presence to ask. The thought had clawed at her for nigh on an hour, although she never questioned that they were, in fact, going somewhere. The woman beside her, who carried her husband’s rifle, looked down at the frail woman with a mixture of surprise and confusion. The procession had, until this point, been roughly silent. A vigil, marching through the streets, only occasionally punctuated by a wail or a yawp. 

“Are you lost, sweet thing?” The woman asks, forcing a smile. Sorrow looked young, delicate almost. The woman with the rifle knew what a Rappeles Toi looked like and placed a reassuring hand on her back.

“No, not lost.” Sorrow responded, still marching with the crowd. “Just unsure.”

The woman with the rifle smiled and rubbed her thumb against Sorrow’s shoulder reassuringly. The way that she imagined Sorrow’s mother did, once. The way Madam Brightwind never had. “There’s a demonstration at the university. Monsieur Georges will be speaking out against the Fleurs.”

Sorrow almost wanted to ask for whom the vigil was for, although I am not sure the woman with the rifle could have answered her. “San Bernadine?” Sorrow paused. “That’s.” 

“About seven kilometers from here?” The woman laughs, but keeps her eyes on the horizon. A laugh of habit, taking the place of anything actually humorous. The type of laugh you make for others, to assuage their fears. Around them, many were laughing like that. They laughed at the snipers, they laughed with their children.

Sorrow shook her head, hair now falling in her face. The stones beneath her cloven hooves wore against her, grating into her mind with every drudging step. She could hear the thousands of souls clattering against them, walking closer and closer into the city’s heart. “Are we going to walk that whole way?”

The woman with the rifle shrugged. “What else can we do but walk together?”

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“Why haven’t they started shooting yet?”

The question did not have an obvious answer, else why would Sorrow Brightwind ask it? But, when she looked back at her companions, they all regarded her with confusion. She turned away from them, looking back towards the demonstration on the streets below. She had never seen the campus of the San Bernadine University, no less step foot upon its grounds. And yet, here Sorrow was, her feet dangling over the edge of one of the academic buildings, feeling the rough stone of the banister digging into her exposed thighs. Below her, on the cobble of the campus grounds, the occasional hoot or yawp from the series of demonstrators could be heard through the overwhelming din of chanting and crackling of flame. 

Nearby, a fire was lit in an overturned trash can. It looked more like a squatters rally, a collection of the destitute and discarded of Mariposa congregating here for warmth, together. Further into the crowds, Stolynn Georges stood above the rest on a makeshift pulpit, his words amplified by nothing but Mariposa’s scorn. A haze hung in the air over him and the natural amplification of the Rae Courtyard made him a giant.

“How many of you worked for a corporate lord?” Stolynn asked, hands gesticulating over the crowd. “How many of you made your daily bread working for a Tyra, a Vujčić, a Fleur?” There was a sudden, desperate rush from the citizens that surrounded him. Even from this rooftop, from where Sorrow and her collective should not have been able to make out the tenor of his words, there is a sudden urge to nod from the unionboys. Each of them branded, in more ways than one, in corporate logos. The Tyra Knife, the Fleur Flower, the Vujčić Bullseye, they are a scar on the bodies of Mariposa. And above them all, nestled deeply in the breast of the city, is the Mariposian Crown. The grandest Corporate Lord of them all.

Stolynn takes a deep breath in, loud enough that the whole city might hear. “How many of these Lords went to work for the Empire after things went shit? Our Queen disappears and leaves us holding the bag?” He glances back towards the Imperial line forming behind him. Sorrow could not see anything beyond a formless, faceless mass of body armor and rifles, the things she had come to expect from the Empire of Night. Stolynn turns back towards the crowd in front of him. “And now, the magnanimous Fleur steps out of the shadows to lead us? To bring us to heel?”

She could not make out the particulars of Stolynn’s appearance from this distance. He was a cambion, much like herself. The infernal red skin and capricious tail gave as much away. Perhaps he was not from the Cambion Coast. His lack of a virtue name, like Sorrow’s, was some indication of that. Records of Mr. Georges’ legacy are spotty at best. Whatever few manifestos that survived the War of the Five Queens focus more on his theory and doctrine, less about the man who wrote them. Georges was a Mariposian name, at least. An old one, records from previous Queen’s show families of George’s paying a myriad of their corporate taxes. But it is not unheard of that people who venture to the city of the outcasts pick new names for themselves. Sometimes it is out of necessity, sometimes it is out of guilt. Sometimes, it is easier to leave such things behind. To reforge yourself fully and truly.

That thought weighed heavy on Sorrow’s mind. She looked back towards her companions, unsure what they were leaving behind. The long walk to the college was the first time she had met the armed woman. . She knew little of her, but enough to trust, I suppose. Beside her was a dwarf missing an eye, a red bandana tied tight around his shooting arm, as if to staunch bleeding. Around his neck, a small bullet glowed in zealous red. It sang, humming gently to the ambient radiation of the universe in a way that unnerved Sorrow to properly look at. And behind the two of them was a reforged mechanized man, Imperial serial number filed off and chassis repainted from night black to silver and red. His gears and circuits whirred, oscillating in time with the ambient machinery of his weapon. I don’t think Sorrow heard him speak during this whole encounter. None of this brigade looked even twice at him, even if his make was clearly imperial. A small, crescent moon is engraved onto his faceplate, right where his hair would have met his brow if he were to have either. Sixteen lights arranged in sequence were his eyes and his mouth glowed in the same silvery blue. 

Sorrow’s face fell to a grimace, a frown. Was this how she was seen? As constituent parts of a past in decay? As the refuse left over from traumatic events? Maybe, it would be easier to become someone new. To amputate any part of her past, to slough off her husband. Like the mechanized man scoured himself of any imperial definition, how the dwarf leaned so heavily into his unionboy aesthetic. 

And then, her eyes lay on the woman’s rifle. See the care in the wood, how splinters and seams were filled to seal any damage. How the gunmetal was polished and brushed. How gingerly she held that weapon of war. How death followed her, foreshadowed by her. And Sorrow thinks she understands. Her face lightens up, her hands grip the parapet a bit tighter.

Behind Stolynn, the men with rifles shifted somewhat. Maybe it was the way the wind adjusted, maybe it was the way they swayed somewhat in opposition to the wind. Maybe it was the way that, even at this distance, Sorrow could feel them tightening their grip. “Our new benefactors.” Stolynn continued, gesticulating both towards the tower and towards the soldiers behind him. “Seek a new Mariposa. One bereft of ‘unclean’ labor, one bereft of the people who had built this city for so many years.” Sorrow narrowed her eyes and turned back towards her companions, each of whom hadn’t responded to her. 

“Why haven’t they started shooting yet?” Sorrow asks again, this time with more urgency. “He mocks them, openly. I can almost feel their rage from here.”

Each of them were armed and had opted to stay around the periphery of the rally. Lessons learned from a rough kettle some years ago. Sorrow was not with weapons, but something about them did not make her feel unsafe. A gut feeling, a note on the back of her tongue. Isosian doctrine teaches adherents to avoid such magics like sense and intuition. “Trust only your eyes, trust only your ears.” Matron Brightwind beat into her.  “All else will deceive you. All else will ruin.” The Wolf trusted such synchronicity, the teachings say, and it led to rebellion. To the shattering of the planes.

And yet, in looking at them, all those thoughts slid to the back of her mind. The voices she heard were just her own. She looked to the dwarf standing on the parapet, towards the large gun in his hand. Cogs and machinery, not unlike the mechanized man behind them, thrumming and humming in time with the bullet around his neck. As if they were one part of one another, as if the gun and the man were one in the same. They each were dressed in the color of Stolynn and his brigadiers, Sorrow came to understand. Unionboys from the Lower Wards. A type of Mariposian lawyer, despite how much they despised the term. Hired by men and women of industry, those that worked the machines and the canneries, to serve their own interest. Even if they refuse to admit they practiced the Queen’s Law, Stolynn’s Brigade often fought on the courts of the public for the public. Enforcers for some sort of common right, against the will of the corporate lords. 

They were no strangers to violence, and they looked the part. Perhaps, the woman with the rifle sought to include Sorrow in their ranks. To fold her into the brigade, to give her purpose and direction. A place to drive her Rappeles Toi. I don’t know. I wish I did, it would help me make sense of this.

The woman with the rifle stifled a grimace at Sorrow’s question, as if the talk of violence upset her, as if the use of that gun she swung around was disgusting. She wasn’t much older than her, realistically. Maybe five years, maybe ten. But she was born in Mariposa, and the woman with the rifle had seen her fair share of corporate violence. She glanced over towards the mechanized pillboys and their escorts that flank the arena, each with their own rifles drawn, but not leveled. If they were Os’ men, if they were in the pockets of the remaining corporate lords, this would have been nothing but a bloodbath. Tempers and heat igniting as soon as Stolynn opened his mouth.

“Because no one has told them to, dear.” The woman with the rifle said, her face falling back into its soft, matronly visage. Besides her, the dwarf with his face painted with a red hand print over a missing eye chuffed. 

“At least not yet.” He remarked. The woman with the rifle reached over and flicked him in the back of his bald head. “Hey! Whatcha-”

Sorrow looked over to her riotous companions, at the group she had somehow found herself among. Madam Brightwind would have been disgusted by her group of friends, each twitching and frothing with something that approximated zeal. She would have discussed how such emotions are ruinous. And Sorrow oft would have listened. And yet, such teachings felt so far now, so distant.

The woman with the rifle crouched next to Sorrow, her hands now on the parapet that the cambion sat on. She eyed the soldiers that flanked Stolynn with distrust. She had seen him in the riots across Le Marc street some years ago, seen the old unionboy in the thick steam of riot. The soldiers stood differently than the corporate lawyer, more measured, more tactical with their hatred. And yet, each soldier she passes, each jackboot she sees in front of her, that facade of measured nature seems so fragile. On the streets below, the jackboots marched in formation through the riotous crowd, who themselves seem too timid to actually inflict any damage on them. No stones have been hurled, no shots fired. Just some broken glass, just some overturned benches. They clear their way through the crowd, who part around the jackboots like the sea around the bow of a boat. Their masks are polished to a mirror sheen, their footfalls are measured and in time, their shoulders are relaxed and their rifles are never level unless they are shooting. They are the facade of professionalism, betraying nothing, allowing nothing, forgiving nothing.

And yet, the woman with the rifle sees something familiar in them. It is in the way their chests rise and fall with breath, the way their hand never practices trigger discipline, the way they stare at you for just a second too long. The woman with the rifle looks down at the jackboots patrolling the streets, as if they are positioning themselves around the demonstration.

“That tower behind us? Dr. Mya’s pet project? How many stories of our ancestors are in there? How much has been stolen from us to pay for it? Stolen by people like Dr. Fleur?” Stolynn points an accusatory finger at the San Bernadine Tower, a tower that had stood as a sign of the private knowledge of the university, the tower that had long locked away knowledge of our world and of our past for just the learned and rich to access to. “The ideology that keeps those bricks from being used in our homes runs in this place, it keeps wealth and knowledge from those who produce it.” His finger curls inwards, pointing now towards the sky, towards the clouded out sun. Behind him, Sorrow could almost feel the soldiers smile.

And, in that moment, Sorrow understands as well. “They aren’t firing yet.” The woman with the rifle tells Sorrow. “Because they’re waiting for a better moment for our pain.”

Sorrow sighs and asks a more pointed question. “Why would they want to savor it?”

No one on that rooftop could answer her. They are not unfamiliar with cruelty. Not a one unfamiliar with sadism or enjoying being the boot. It is just this cruelty that escapes them, it is the cruelty of people who view you as lesser and themselves as greater. Even in the darkest hearts of the corpo lawyers, their glee was with persecution of their fellow Mariposian, having power over what could have been them.

“Whatever kindness General Rosengart may have portrayed in sicking the Butcher of Blackvien on us is up in smoke.” Stolynn continued, spittle flying, baptizing the crowd. “What few corporate lords remained sold their companies to the Empire. Instituted their so-called strictures and dictates here. The taxes of Daysend, the laws of Daysend. Not laws of Mariposa! Never laws of Mariposa!”

The crowd erupted, the whole of Mariposa seeming to come alive. Each hand gripping their pink slip a bit tighter, each man gripping his fellow just a bit harder. They screamed, they cried, they shouted and the air itself felt agitated. Sorrow saw her fellow Mariposian’s on the street below her, each inexplicably able to hear Stolynn despite the distance, began to turn towards the Imperial Jackboots patrolling the edge of the kettle. No violence, not yet. But even from this distance, even from the way that their backs are towards Sorrow, she could feel their snarls, their sneers. It was in the way their shoulders held them, it was in the way they leveled their rifles in unison, as if they had no need to communicate, as if they all knew what these people were. 

To the Imperial Soldier, such displays of gross nationalism was why Mariposa needed to be brought to heel. To the Imperial Soldier, no Mariposian ever could have been them. No one had told them to start firing, but they knew the order would be coming soon -- and patience was a virtue. Silence falls over the rooftop as wind whistles between them. The Unionboys look towards Stolynn, towards the kill zone that their fellow Mariposians now sit in. They see the groups congregating on the rooftops of the various campus buildings, see the glint of scopes across the San Bernadine Spire. They do not know whether or not they were friend or foe, they do not know whether or not the noose was tightening. The warm brick of the campus seemed duller for a moment, even as the cloud breaks and the sun of an early spring day begins to peek out in the fingers of the gods themselves, the Jacob’s Ladders reaching down from the divine heavens themselves. They shine across the Concordat of Miracles, that feral angel that watches over the whole of Mariposa.

Sorrow thinks to utter a prayer, thinks to ask her god for forgiveness for this city. To ask that the noose might not tighten. Her eyes meet the thousands and thousands of eyes of the Concordat, and she can feel her watching Sorrow, so much and so truly that she now feels comfortable ascribing the angel gender and agency. The words die in her throat, her mind reeling with only one thought, unsure and uncertain of its source. Was it divine? Was it a word of obliteration, to end all things? Sorrow swore she heard it, swore she felt it crawl into her ears from her shoulder. It nested in the back of her eyes, making even looking at such a divinity hard.

“You all deserve this.” The thought whispered. “It should have been you.”

Sorrow’s eyes drop low, breaking contact with the Concordat of Miracles. And the thought escapes her, leaves her mind the same way it entered. Slithering from behind her eyes and dropping onto the ground through her ear, taking with her all sense and vitality. Eyes remain open, unable to shut out the world around her.

This is when, my dear reader, she sees them. 

They are not imperial soldiers. Of this, Sorrow is sure. In this moment of despair, in this moment of un-vigilance, it is something to moor her, something to settle and nerve her. A truth she can cling to. Four individuals weave their way through the noxious crowd, who’s chanting and cheering began to reach a closer and closer fevered pitch. The imperial jackboots around them shuffle in their boots, still awaiting the order, still slavering with violence. As the crowds part around them, keenly aware of their intrusion, the four individuals do not provoke such a response. They weave through the crowd as if they are unseen, unnoticed. Sorrow first notices the speed at which they can move, how they can effortlessly brush past the citizens of Mariposa.

“We should warn Stolynn.” The woman with the rifle notes, seemingly unaware of Sorrow or her thoughts. She eyes the cambion man standing in the distance with a mixture of care and disdain. “Evacuate the protest.”

“Imperial protocol is not to fire unless fired upon.” The red and silver mechanized man stated. His voice was not as cold as Sorrow had thought it would be. It did not modulate in odd ways, it sounded almost too natural, even while parroting imperial code. “Unless otherwise threatened or potentially threatened.”

“Stu.” The dwarf chuffs. It almost sounds like a laugh, like some sort of deep, primal thing. His hand swept over the crowd like a farmer survailing his wheat and chaff. “They’re threatened by our very existence.” He sounds almost too proud of himself, too proud of his Mariposians.

“There’s someone down there.” Sorrow says meekly, the words more escaping than being stated. She eyes the four individuals dashing through the crowds, sees how they are dressed. Pressed, black suits with no room for tolerances. Each of them meticulously measured and cut as to fit only that individual and only at that time. If they were to grow a centimeter in any direction, the fit would be all off and fill the user with discomfort. Drawn from their breast holsters were E-99 oscillating revolvers, manufactured by Weyland Arms and Electronics, each with the same tolerances as their suits. 

There were no safeties on the E models of pistols, and only seven shots before the bullet that powered the firearm must be cycled to cool. They were barely functioning, highly experimental firearms that held together more so out of sheer will than any sort of engineering marvel. None survived the war, unable to hold itself together under the sheer strain of repeated use and fire. Expensive to maintain and purchase, but they could output a higher volume of fire than any other conventional handgun on the market. They were a killer's weapon. Not to disarm, not to scare or protect. Easily concealable, easy to hide in the vest of your coat. They could put a hole in a quarter inch body armor at 60 yards.

“What, you want to fling ourselves into the meat grinder too?” The woman with the rifle asked, although it was more like she was begging to. Her hand had not been off the handle of her rifle this entire time. Her mouth dripped with violence, so steeled was she to war. “Don’t you want to practice some law?” She half joked, eyes remaining down towards the crowd, ignoring Stolynn in his entirety.

Among the group of four, there was a gruff, white haired veteran of many wars, a sharp and cruel looking Villy, a fellow cambion man with skin as verdant as Sorrow’s, and a halfling who seemingly struggled to keep pace. None of them were noticed, not by the soon to be rioters, not the unionboys on the roof, not even the imperial jackboots. Sorrow swears she sees one of them turn, the young Villy maybe, towards her. She swears she sees him wink.

“Guys!” Sorrow exclaims. The heads of her companions snap towards her, their bickering dying down for a moment. “There’s someone in the crowd!”

The unionboys rush over to the parapet, their speed almost threatening to push poor Sorrow from off the edge. In a moment, and without any particular thought, all three of their hands find Sorrow’s shoulders, keeping her from teetering over the edge. As if they knew she was in trouble, as if they knew she was to die without them. Sorrow’s shaky hand draws a line towards the suits, and then the spell is seemingly broken. Like an illusion that shifts when one draws attention to it, the unionboys knew what, now, to look for.

The woman with the rifle scowls and bares her teeth. “Fleur agents.” She mutters. Her breath is hot on Sorrow’s neck, wet almost. Her hand tenses for a moment before she finds herself again. Her eyes snap down towards her hand on Sorrow’s shoulder, and sees the green skin bruising under her rage. She pulls away and looks at her hand for a moment. Her fingers tremble, her knuckles are white. Her face is unreadable.

Sorrow wants to look back towards her companions, to look them in the eyes for some kind of bearing, some kind of direction. Although she knows when she does, when she looks at the people who could be friends, she might lose sight of these agents. And, somehow, that thought scares her much more than any perceived lack of direction, any unmooring, ever could. These Fleur Agents move like predators through the crowd, like wolves through the whistling reeds. The way they skulk, the way they duck through people without breaking a stride or formation, the way their chests rise and fall in perfect synchronicity. Sorrow knows, beyond knowing, that they thrive living in the space between mystery and fact.

“Fleur agents?” Sorrow asks, as if she could force them out of that superposition, force them into one or the other. “Like Fleur Pharmaceuticals?”

The dwarf chuffs again. His hand on her shoulder is more reassuring, more comforting somehow. There is none of the pain like there was with the woman with the rifle, none of the hurt. “Our new pit bosses, right.” He debates taking a shot at them right here and now. He’s heard the stories, he’s heard why you don’t walk down Le Marc street after dark. “Corporate Lawyers and Dr. Fleur’s pet projects.”

“Reclusive rogues who rely on subterfuge and advanced biotechnology.” Stu mentions off handedly. His grip was cold, somewhere between the dwarf’s reassurance and the woman with the rifle’s anger. He holds on to Sorrow for stability and stability alone. “Fleur Pharmaceuticals was bought out by Queen Mariposa the Kingbreaker some one-hundred and sixty three years ago. They’ve been operating under various different shell corporations ever since.”

“You’re awfully knowledgeable, Stu.” The woman with the rifle remarks.

“I was a student here, once.” He says, his voice more monotone than he was intending. “At the college.”

“Must make your oil burn to see the place like this, huh Stu?” The dwarf half jokes before a moment of realization dawns upon him. The dwarf turned towards him and squinted. “Is that where you got your name?”

“Fleur Agents.” Stu continued, ignoring the dwarf’s question. “Have largely been considered a myth. Considered a story fathers tell their children.”

“They’re real.” The woman with the rifle mutters, vile dripping from her words. Her eyes focus on the agents on the streets below with some familiarity. In fact, to each of them, these lawyers looked all too familiar. Too easy to dismiss them as an illusion or allusion. Too simple to keep them as myth. Their familiarity makes Sorrow tremble, her eyes want to avert, want to forget.  “Their shadows swallow children and destitute, like they slipped down a drain into the heart of the city. 

“Makes me wonder what my painkillers are made of.” The dwarf half-jokes, still keened on the halfling of the group. “Maybe I don’t wanna know.”

“They’re bad news.” The woman with the rifle stands from her position. She turns towards the rooftop door. “Let's be worse.”

Sorrow looks over to her companions. The dwarf grows a smile and racks his gun. Stu’s faceplate gives nothing away, but his lights flicker in contentment. She sees them walking towards the door, sees them walking into that ruinous death that waits below. Above them, a crow flies and disappears in a sunbeam. She turns back towards the crowd and is shocked to not be able to see them any more. Somehow, she feels as if all four of those agents are behind her, feels the ghost of their hands around her shoulders and around her neck. Not seeing them is worse than knowing where they are.

Sorrow stands up, the hem of her dress catching on the rough stone of the parapet. As if it is demanding, begging her to stay here. Stay where it is safe, do not go, it will miss you. She doesn’t notice, of course. And as she stands up, it rips the fabric, tears part of the dress that her husband bought. It even tears her skin slightly, so hastily did she move. As her hand reaches the door, as she hears the echoes of her companions down the metal stairway into the unknown and abyss, the first gunshot cracks from across the pavilion. From the sound of it, it is unknown who fired. Not even I know. The fabric still caught on the rough stone blows gently in the breeze. There is screaming, and more gunfire. She hesitates at the door frame. 

Then another crack of lead, of the bullet singing across the air and the fire. She looks back towards the parapet she stood on and sees the fabric fluttering gently in the wind, beckoning one last time to return. To be safe here, with the entirety of the dress. To sow it back on and forget this place. To allow herself the whole of her grief, not to segment it into parts that might be more palatable.

She, however, does not listen. And so, Sorrow begins her walk down.

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Have you ever smelt burning, dear reader?

I mean true burning. Burning without purpose. Not a fire to warm, not a stove to heat, not even a hearth to commiserate over. In each of those cases, there is something else to obstruct the smell. Camaraderie, love, compassion. The fire becomes a vector for those things. but those emotions, those acts, dilute the power of fire. Make it something comfortable, something that you can keep as a pet. You can keep it in a hearth or in a pilot light, flickering gently forever 

But strip that away, what do you have? Flames and tinder. Pure, primal entropy. The wood takes on certain smells when burnt, of course, but even the way the fire catches the air has a smell to it. It dances along the tongue, fills your head with heat. It is intoxicating and vicious. It fills the blood with carbon, turns your thoughts to sludge and to ruin. It is the smell of the desperation of fire, how it is so keen to injure, so keen to spread and to consume.

They say fire has no will of its own. That it is a chemical force, a rapid oxidation. It is a process, the act of transformation between states of being. That it doesn’t dance, that it doesn’t entrance or beckon. You can understand it, that it is a causal relationship. That fire starts when a flash point is hit, when coalescing forces act upon a fuel. The tinder of inequity, a long standing dryness of monarchist sentiment, and an abundance of rage being the oxidizer. And trust me, dear reader, there was plenty of rage to be had. All such a tinderbox would need is a spark, a flash where these things combine into conflagration, into inferno. A gunshot. A boot on the neck. A child screaming just a bit too loud. Any of these things could spark. Any of these things did spark before.

And yet, all of that ignores the temporality of fire. The moments before such a burning incur the penalty of the flames. The smell of sawdust on the air, the feeling of dry that hangs like a mist. The way the wind shifts, how it blows errant sparks. How the rifle looks in the hands of the man in front of you. How anger dries the grass. The area around something that is to be burnt is saturated with it. Fire is causal, this is what they tell you. Because causality is easy, because there is an event that follows a combination of sources. It allows for dissection, it allows for change. Move the oily rags away from the fireplace, caution against rage and against anger. Do these things next time, and fire will not happen. 

It takes away any purpose, any drive from the tinder. It takes away agency from those who kept the tinder dry enough to begin with. It brings the issue with the fire itself, not with the things that precipitated it. It points a finger at flame and says “there, kill it. There, snuff it out.” Ignoring what fire wants to do, ignoring that fire is the will of fuel, the desire to process and to change forms. It denies that the things that burn may have needed to in the first place. 

Fire wants to burn.

Given enough time, it will find any excuse to do so. It will creep into the walls, it will creep into the fields or into the forests. Because the things we do, the things necessary for such an improvement, are both antecedent and subsequent of fire. Progress invites it in, growth invites it in. We need to respect that, allow different outlets for such inferno. Allow the flames to burn into something productive. This lesson is one Mariposa did not learn. 

One that Sorrow Brightwind refused to learn.

The streets she rushed out into were choked with that pre-fire. The air was thick with rage, so sickly sweet was it that you could taste it on your tongue. The sky had, as if it were ablaze itself, caught in streaks of bright orange and yellow, despite the fact it was perhaps no later than three in the afternoon. The clouds above churned in ways that made it clear no rain was in sight. They swirled like they were saturated with soot and with char, like they were caught in the updraft of some grand conflagration, some world burning flame. 

The streets were arush with anger. The gunshots echoed throughout the brick buildings, although seemingly none of them were followed with any more loosening of lead. There was screaming, of course. There was yelling, both to and from the jackboots who were tightening the noose. Sorrow looked around the now frantic crowd, desperately searching for her companions who were not three steps ahead of her just a moment before. It looks as if the kettle that they were so concerned about twenty minutes prior had been more a premonition than paranoia. The people around her were a mix of anger, frustration, and fear. Nearby, a jackboot brings a rifle down against a man's head. He cries out as a tooth is cracked on the ground. He doesn’t even know who fired the first shot. Nearby, a child looks around, scared, for her mother. Nearby, a person is shouting expletives in Algeran as iron handcuffs are placed around their wrists. Nearby, thousands of different inequities happen all at once. Tinder, waiting to be sparked. 

“Isosa, please.” Sorrow muttered, her own thoughts drowned out by the yelling. She could hear herself clear, though. Razor keened, through the noxious smell of the pre-ash around her. “Please, a safe place.” It is all she could choke out around the ash that soon is to fill her lungs.

She looks up, tries to see the Concordat of Miracles from here. Tries to see that feral angel which at any and all points in Mariposa could be seen. She fails, dear reader. All she can see is the screaming, eternal horizon. And so she runs, she pushes through the crowd, deeper and deeper into the kettle. She can hear less and less of the jackboots, a fact that should comfort her. Perhaps there is a place further on where they are not, perhaps there is a place where she could break through. One of the sandals from her foot falls away, either burning away or snapping under the immense strain, but she continues. Pushing past the wailing, churning mass of humanity before her. She feels their warmth, she feels the wetness of their sweat and their tears on her shoulders. And she grips her hand tighter in vigilance. There is a safe place, she is sure.

Across the courtyard, she hears it. The inchoate choir of Mariposa, the voice of kommos, the voice of scorn. “See how they hunt us?” The voice says, as if the city herself is speaking. The crowd grunts in agreement, even Sorrow feels an affirmation escape her lips as she walks, so caught in the zeal was she. “See how they starve and beat us? It is a cowardice, too scared to fight a foe at their strength. Too scared to act beyond laws and dictates, too scared to see Mariposa at it's proudest.”

It is as if the voice changes the movement of the people, as soon as those words escape the roiling, churning chaos everything has a purpose. The men with arms turn towards the spire, the women with weapons break into a sprint. People of all walks of life, all Mariposian’s now, turn towards the horizon and see just one thing. The spire of San Berandine University. The Spire where, for hundreds of years, knowledge and riches have coalesced from all corners of the world. The Spire where it had books on music and love and war that none of them would ever read. The Spire where the corporate lords who make up the board of the university would meet and be served little cakes on little trays where just six blocks down a woman starved to death six times over. The Spire where the suffering of war was arbitrary and hypothetical. The Spire where Dr. Fleur sat on the board of directors. 

In a moment, every eye that could see that Spire knew what it was built upon. From the Jackboot to the Unionboys to Stolynn himself, every mind was a rush and burdened with that divine, horrible knowledge of suffering. That every person, if for a moment, is understanding of what has been hoarded there. Every mind knew for an instant the call of the void.

Then the air catches fire.

As if from nowhere, as if the old maxims of Mariposa were true, every rioter draws weapon. Pistols and rifles and knives and bits of wood and bats and clubs and swords and rifles. They were not armed at the start of the demonstration, not so much so that every man, woman, and child could produce such violence in a moment's notice. But I am sure, sure as anything dear reader, that those weapons appeared from nothing but pure might. That will mixed with metal so harsh and true that not even I could tell by the end which was there at the beginning of the day and which was not.

 They shown in the light of the fire that now adorned their hands, and cracks of sickening violence rung out from the crowd. Pinging projectiles off the bricks and ricocheting chaos, a bat comes down onto the skull of an Imperial Jackboot. Hands erupt in flame as nearby windows and passersby get caught up in the cacophony of  the movement. There are screams, there is blood to be spilled. To call it infectious is to downplay the severity of the transmission. It did not spread from person to person, it did not slowly trickle into the water and into the minds of the rioters. 

It was a flashpoint, an instantaneous reaction of oxidizer, fuel, and pain. In a single moment, every mind was coalesced into one, sublimating rage. To move towards the San Bernadine Tower. To take up, hand in hand with the person next to you, and burn that tower to the ground. To lock arms and move forward.

Even Sorrow, frail in spirit, felt the call. Her hands tightening in rage, her teeth grinding so hard she feels dust in the back of her mouth. She feels the sweat and the heat of the flames lapping at the back of her mind. It is all she can do to not look at that tower, which was set against a dower, hateful sun. She knew if she did, if she were to lift her eyes towards the building, there would be no going back, there would be no stopping her fists from balling in absent flame. Her eyes were shut tight, pushing through the undulating, swarming crowd. Tears were sublimating on her cheek as she felt it. Felt the watch of that tower. Felt it's call. It sounded like the voice of angels, a plurality of sharpness and razors edge song. Come, Sorrow my child. Burn me. Burn me down. How many people had heard that call? How many saw rebirth in it? Saw the sun rising instead of setting? 

How many, dear reader, saw dusk and thought of dawn?

The sky above was awash with streaks of lavender and rose, like the fingers of Mariposa were screaming against it, tearing into its sweet, supple flesh. The towering citadels of Mariposian progress stretched past the clouds, carving long streaks of shadowing into the sky. Each was basking in that rising sun, each a towering inferno waiting to happen. The voices around Sorrow were maddening, their chants and screams and pleas of no more each beckoning her into that open dawn, beckoning her into some kind of rebirth. A glass shatters next to her. A foot falls a little too hard. Empyrial voices yell some kind of slur. Sorrow is running, far and fast, from that rising, burning, terrible sun. She ran, ducking under arms and weaving between bodies with a sense that she had never felt before. The heat around her radiated so strongly that she could feel the edges of each person in the crowd. Even bereft of her sense, she knew just when to duck, when to move to the side, when to crawl to avoid its flames. She ran for what felt like hours. She ran as gunshots whizzed around her, as she heard a scream of wounded and as she felt the flames grow higher and higher. She ran so fast that, when she did come to a stop, when the bridge of her foot hit a brick lip, it sent her tumbling into cool, still water. 

Sorrow gasped as the chill hit her skin, letting the stagnant water into her mouth. She quickly raised her head, opened her eyes, and breathed a sigh of relief. It was her reflection. Sorrow was staring back into herself, and that was a sight she could trust. And then, the blood trickled in. And she looked up to see where she was. 

 It is a small fountain that has since stopped running. Each of the rioters had their back turned, too preoccupied with their own movement, with their own heat and warmth. It was an eye, a stillness, a fountain dedicated to one of the deans of the past. Marble, sculpted with precision and grace. The water had stopped flowing from the statue, leaving only the pool in the basin to slowly be drained. The air was getting dryer, the water was steaming. Pushed against the statue was a jackboot. His helmet was shattered, his hand was clasped around an injury, his chest falling up and down, up and down, up and down in steady, belabored breath. His armor was at least a quarter of an inch thick, and yet it looked torn like paper, buckled in and mixing with his viscera. The fabric of the garment he wore was seared onto his skin at the point of impact, metal jutting out into flesh, tearing and rending it for every moment onwards. For a moment, it is just the two of them. It is the first time Sorrow has seen an Imperial without a helmet on.

She imagined them as beasts. As barbarians with painted faces and piercings, with slavering teeth and blood stained eyes. He was not that. He was a young man from Karnata, with sandy skin and scared, angry eyes. He grimaced through the pain and scowled at her. He wanted to spit, but found his mouth too dry, his lips cracked and flowing with blood.

“I can’t die here.” He mutters in Empyrial. “Not in. This fucking disgusting.” He coughs, slumping against the statue a bit harder for support. The marble cracks. Bits of stone fall into the basin, splashing the both of them with the mixture of ichor and water. “Not here, not in this. Place.”

“I don’t- I don’t know.” Sorrow says, her eyes drenched with compassion. “What are you saying? How can I help?”

And then, Sorrow blinks. Or maybe it was a bit of ash. Or maybe, for a moment, she was distracted by another gunshot. The crowd begins to move around the fountain, still not looking at the two of them inside. Towards the tower. The screaming has turned to yelling now. Somewhere, someone strikes a match to light a cigarette. It was a noise that keened Sorrow’s senses, allowing her to focus on only the surrounding thirty feet. And when she opens her eyes, when that brief moment of respite ends, there is another person.

He is standing in the basin with them, his black slacks rolled up around his shins and his standard issue black loafers, polished and unscuffed, are placed beside the fountain on the rim. In his hand, an E-99 oscillating revolver hums gently with his bioluminescence, as if the two of them are oscillating in time. His skin is a deep, violent purple. His hair, or what Sorrow thinks is his hair, is almost blue, that is how white it is. It almost absorbs light, refracts it into hues that were hitherto unseen by any Brightwind that has ever existed. He looks peaceful and his back is turned towards Sorrow. The barrel of his revolver emanates so much heat that the water a couple feet below it is sublimating almost, shimmering in mirage just above the waterline. 

He was not standing here a moment before, and yet he looked as inanimate as the statue he stands in front of. A vily, dressed in a full black suit. Sorrow gasps, although whether it was from his sudden intrusion into this reality or from an understanding of who he was is not known. Heat creeps around him, stilling all movement from the air. It is both hot and cool, it is both still and active. He turns his head to look at her, his eyes peering over his shoulder. She remembers them being white, like he was blind. She remembers how starkly they contrasted with the violet of his skin, how it felt important to remember how they shifted slightly with his bioluminescence.

Then, she remembers how the light flittered back into them. How, he appeared as if he was flooding back into his own body. And then, she remembers how he opened his mouth to speak, how wide and full of teeth it was.

“Well.” The vily agent said in a voice that sounded too kind for him. He fully turned around, his short, cropped hair tousled slightly in the breeze. “Aren’t you a frail thing.” The words sounded more cruel than the man was capable of. Sorrow tried to take a step back, but her feet found the edge of the fountain. The vily agent looked down at the body behind him, at his straining feet attempting to find purchase.

“I um, really should go.” It was all Sorrow could muster. Behind her the crowd was churning, an impenetrable wall of fearful flesh. “My husband.” The words felt unfamiliar, unfortunate, in her mouth. “He’s waiting. For me.”

From across the courtyard, from towards the spire, a single, booming voice rings out. It is as if the crowd all turns at once towards it. The movement stops. The churning, miserable heat does not. “Mariposians!” It says, it's accent is laden with thick brogue. Sorrow was unable to pick out who was saying what. It took all her focus to keep the vily in front of her, it blocked out the rest of the world. Everything around her was churning, incoherent flames. The sky turned orange and even the tower, with all it's stained glass, shown in a brilliant, warm light. “How dare this tower be used for anything but the bricks in our house ever again?

The vily pocketed his gun in his vest and extended his unarmed hand, as if the person behind him did not just breath one last, ragged, sputtering breath. He looked over towards his shoes. He was calm. He was peaceful, even in the heat of this raging inferno. His face seemed almost sad, and just a bit too kind. The vily reminded Sorrow of a paladin she once knew, back on the coast. She was a little girl and she had not yet met her husband. Both were composed, both were wiry and both had that little hook in their noses. 

He looked trustworthy. Like a web, enticing and mooring in the chaos of the winds. “I can take you to him, miss.” The vily says, extending a cool hand. His hair blows gently in the wind, an errant ash lands on his brow. He is a deep purple. The water is draining around his feet. “This place is not safe for you.”

She understood that as a threat, dear reader. How could she not? The way he moved betrayed his intention. Her eyes could not be taken off of them, like beasts that the body instinctively knows to be dangerous. Like wolves, circling the flock. Like in a moment, she could be whisked away to where her pain and misery would be a mystery to everyone, that she could be so thoroughly forgotten and expunged from history that not even I could write about it. It would be no great sacrifice, no great martyr. She would not even give Oflay the chance to perform the Rappelles Toi. If she were to vanish, all she would leave in her wakes were what ifs and might have beens, theories to be pondered, agonized over, but never solved. 

Oflay would never tell herself “it should have been you” if Sorrow disappeared that way. There would be no knives of grief that the survivors could keen into some sort of direction. No weapons of sorrow to be forged. She fought the urge to take a step forward, into that oblivion. Something of this crowd, it forewarned her own death. She saw it everywhere. She saw it on the crows that perched above, she saw it in the muddy, sunken reflections in this fountain. Ever since she had emerged from that room, the room where her husband lay, all she could see was corpsed. And, by the grand weft of Isosa herself, she found herself at the feet of the San Bernadine Spire. She had been swept up in the zeal of movement, of direction, that she had found herself in perdition, in predation. If she is gunned down here, in the dirty violent streets of Mariposa, she leaves behind grief, she leaves behind purpose to be lived up to. She leaves behind more death in her name.

Without thought, Sorrow began to move, her body lurched forward towards, almost tumbling over itself in its attempt at forward. The vily smiled as her feet moved through the brackish water.

But, in oblivion, she leaves nothing behind. Not samsara, not memories, not grief. Sorrow would leave nothing behind and that is a gift she could never give her daughter otherwise. She could give her peace, in the wailing, gnashing siren song of the Fleurs. She could give Oflay peace. It called to Sorrow, urging her to take a step forward into those waiting teeth. 

Peace. 

Smoke builds around them, but Sorrow can not see it. The water was so, so cold. The rioters scream, unaware of who is in their midst. The fires rise, the wet, ashy heat surrounds them. The vily extended his non-dominant hand. The bioluminescence flickering under his skin seemed to call to her, seemed familiar. He opened his mouth to speak again, perhaps to summon her home. His other hand reached towards his gun.

At last, peace.

“Don’t you dare fucking touch her, freak!”

And, the moment is shattered. 

The woman with the rifle breaks through the roiling crowd, her feet splashing the fountain’s water across the both of them. Her nose is broken. Her breath is shallow. Sorrow fell backwards from the sheer force of the woman with the rifle landing between the two of them. The hem of her dress is now soaked, the water more muddy than she had thought it was. The sun shown behind the woman with the rifle’s head, haloing her in a beautiful, deadly aurora. Corona’s of light shooting around and through her updone hair. The rifle was in her hand by its forearm, its barrel red and hot and blisteringly white. It bent slightly in the heat, making its operation impossible. Visera and dents now marked the stock. 

Her mouth dripped with blood.

Sorrow looked upon her with reverence and with fear. “Stolynn?” She muttered, questioning who was in front of her. The haze of the air marred her sense, allowing her to see what she wanted to see. By the time Sorrow recognized the woman with the rifle, she was already moving again, swiveling the rifle down against the vily assassin. 

The vily swept right, his bare feet knocking his loafers into the fountain. He looked down at them with a grimace. The rifle just barely misses him. The woman it was holding lets out a grunt, a growl, a choice expletive or two. The agent balanced on the fountain’s edge, revolver in his hand. “Now miss, was that exactly necessary?” He asked, as if more annoyed by the inconvenience of the wet shoes. “The leather wasn’t cheap, after all. And I didn’t take you for one to waste.”

The woman with the rifle grunted in response, dropping her shoulders low, her arms hanging limp. The rifle was still gripped tightly in her hands, the makeshift warhammer still ready for violence. She breaks into a sprint and lashes back out against the assassin. Water sprays between the two of them. Brackish, muddy, roiling. A bolt of heat lightning flashes for a moment against the water. The air on Sorrow’s tongue is thick. It is laden. It is leadened. Ash and bile mix in the back of her throat. She tries to get to her feet.

She fails.

The vily jumps back into the fountain, only dodging the rifle’s swing by inches. He levels his revolver at where he thinks the woman with the rifle will be. Sorrow can almost see the calculations in his head of barrel drift and velocity. It is in the way his eyes dart between beads of water, it is in the way his eyes shift in measurements of micrometers, it is in the way his body tilts to align perfectly with the barrel of his revolver. The woman with the rifle has no such grace, no such precision. So, when tactically it would have been smart to keep to his right as the vily predicts, she keeps on his left. She is on the same side as his revolver. If he were to pull the trigger at this moment, it would pierce her heart. It would stop her.

He continues turning right for a moment too long. And by the time his synapses realize she is not keeping out of his line of fire, by the time his mind realizes she is doing the opposite of what he expects, the action potential has been reached. His cells polarize. His muscles contract. His body moves in spite of him. His hand squeezes. The gun goes off. And it misses his target. 

The woman with the rifle can barely hear the shot go off over the pounding of blood in her ears, nor does she have the wherewithal to properly understand that a gun has been shot in the first place. She can only focus on the reflection of herself and Sorrow in the vily’s pearlescent eyes. It is difficult to keep her focus on him, as if he is trying to slide from off of her eyes. Her mind reels, she sees pure movement. The edges of her body burn away. Her skin is alight with rage. Every sense she can feel at that moment razor keens onto a single, burning idea.

She needs to hurt this man.

Hurting him is all she can do at this moment. Hurting him gives Sorrow a chance to escape. Hurting him gives her a chance to survive. Hurting him will heal Mariposa. Hurting him will feel so good. She needs to hurt him in every way that him and his kind have hurt. Her feet hit the stone of the fountain, now almost completely having sublimated away. A shock of purpose surges through her muscles. They tear. They rend. They put every inch of power, every single thought and idea, into this single, perfect swing. The rifle arcs through the air. A building catches fire. Plasma arcs between the molecules of air. The air itself screams and singles in immolate, beautiful rage. This woman was made for this.

Hurting him will feel so good.

“Stop it!” 

The voice is almost childlike. It cuts through the air, it cuts through the flames and through the blood and pierces the woman with the rifle’s mind itself. It reminds her of her daughter, the one she left behind in Rishi. It reminds her of smoldering. And of faint wind blowing and of hungry nights. The rifle continues its arc, there is no stopping that movement now. But without that focus, with the woman’s concentration shattered, she is no longer exactly sure of the agent’s place here. Doubt creeps in. And the rifle hits the stone lip of the fountain. The wood finally gives in and shatters. The water has now completely drained from the basin. She turns towards the voice in desperation and in concern and sees Sorrow sitting there, back against the fountain’s edge. 

Her dress is dripping with the now drained water. Her face is pale, her mouth open in fear. The edges of Sorrow’s nails are stained with her own blood from how hard they dig into the stone. She is trembling, quivering even. She looks even more like her daughter than anytime before.

“Please, do not hurt him.” Sorrow manages to get out. “I… I think I know him.” Her mouth is dripping with fear. The woman with the rifle just stands there, agast. The rifle now broken, dashed against the stonework. Her face is unreadable to Sorrow. I know it is disgust, dear reader. Confusion and disgust. That is a secret I keep close. To ever know what that face looks like. Her hands drop the rifle into the now dry, burning fountain.

“What do you mean-” is all the woman can manage before the vily assassin sticks his boot knife between the T10 and T11 of the vertebral column. Her legs give out, the signals of her brain firing in all directions. The agent twists his knife, left instead of right this time. His arm wraps around her waist almost delicately, holding her upright as he shifts the knife up further into her diaphragm. He can hear the blood beginning to fill her thoracic cavity. He can feel her blood drip down the hilt of his knife and onto his wrist. Sorrow sees his eyes again. And they are devoid of light.

“You’re right, brother.” The vily says to no one in particular. “An unforeseen event indeed.”

The woman without the rifle grabs onto the vily’s arm like he is leading a dance. She tilts her head back towards his. He cradles her as her knees continue to fail her. 

“Why?” She manages to get out between bloody gurgles. She looks back at Sorrow. “Why?”

“Shush shush shush.” He places his hand on her forearm. His fingers are stained with blood. “You’ll bleed out faster. And no one wants that.”

The woman without the rifle meets Sorrow’s eyes, her head falls down limply. It is all she can do to make sure Sorrow sees her one last time. And Sorrow does not see disgust this time. She does not see hatred or anger. Merely peace. Sorrow swears she almost sees a smile.

And then the air catches fire.

Sorrow begins to cry, but the tears evaporate upon meeting her verdant skin. Her blood begins to glow, her hair begins to fray and singe and light like dry tinder. Sorrow grips the stonework even tighter, clenched her teeth even harder. The adrenalin, the hatred, it fills her veins. Suffuses her with an absent flame. Her body begins to tremble. The vily agent begins to back away with the woman without the rifle’s limp body in his hands. He doesn’t even realize what she is doing. His first foot enters the crowd. She knows, dear reader. She knows if she does not act now he will disappear with her. He will take her with her and she will become myth. 

And she can not allow that to happen.

Her eyes keen on the woman without the rifle’s chest. Her eyes keen past that, through her towards the center of the Fleur Agent himself. And she begins to draw her pistol from her belt. A pistol she did not have. A pistol that was made from absent flame and from will. A pistol she knows beyond knowing that she will own soon. She attempts to draw her pistol from the future. The space around her hands crack like a mirror. The world stands still. She is handing it to herself. Her hand almost finds purchase on its ivory. Just a bit more, she thinks. Her fingers ghost the cold metal of the trigger. She continues to draw it, her arms moving in spite of herself. She needs to save her, Sorrow lies to herself. This is all to save her.

Then she sees the woman without the rifle’s smile. She thinks herself a paladin. As high and as mighty as those who protect Isosa from the vile and the monstrous. She has saved Sorrow, even if Sorrow had killed her in doing so. It is in the way her eyes fall. It is the way her lips tremble. It is in the way her hands do not grab at stones, the way her legs do not kick. The flames lick at the back of Sorrow’s hand as the pistol now enters into her line of sight. 

The woman without the rifle is a Mariposian. She is a rebellion against her goddess, who basks in the anathema of feral angels. She is a worker who toils and builds things. She is someone who hurts others, who betrays order for the sake of mercy. 

Mercy. 

The most vile of the vices.

Her face is wrapt in anger, the flames crowd the edges of her eyes. The Spire in the distance, begins to burn. A book turns to ash almost instantly. The woman without the rifle, what does she seek? To be the one who gives mercy? To take whatever place Sorrow might have? Sorrow’s finger finds the trigger and it cuts her. She bleeds flame. Her hands are shaking, threatening to pull the gun apart. It is fragile. It is fleeting. Who does she think she is, to bring herself as high as to protect her? To replace her in the arms of peace? The vily offers obliteration and the woman without the rifle would STEAL IT FROM HER!

Sorrow’s eyes find the woman’s heart. It is beating. Loud. True. It is alight with every vice that has been beaten into Sorrow. Mercy, sacrifice, obligation. Her veins are alight with the aspect of the Wolf, as this whole city is. The Miracle. It hangs low above the city. Sorrow can feel its eyes on her. Engulfing her. Urging her. Destroy her. It beckons. Burn her down. Anathema. I lay upon her anathema. Sorrow, it beckons, the trigger. You can feel it. 

Her sights are upon the woman’s heart. The vily pulls her deeper into the crowd. The time is fleeting, Sorrow. Anathema. She curls her finger around the trigger. The blood flows. It is flame. Anathema. She stole what Sorrow needed, what Oflay needed. The end, it is quickening. She can hear the riotous drums. The roil of the crowd. They are moving away from her, towards something new. Sorrow is staying still. Sorrow is staying murderously still. She is dead already, Sorrow. This is just. Anathema. 

Anathema. 

ANATHEMA.

Weakness.

It is a moment of pure weakness that keeps Sorrow from pulling the trigger. 

It is the moment between heartbeats, between seconds. Sorrow is back on the rooftop. Sorrow is back in the march. Sorrow feels the woman without the rifle’s hand on her back. Sorrow can hear Stolynn’s chants. It creeps in between the flames. It intersperses passion and fills her blood with sympathy. With sentimentality. Her eyes catch the fleeting smile. Her strong hands. Her laugh.

And her gun falls apart.

She tries to pull the trigger. It is not there. The rage is gone, leaving only bitter hollow on Sorrow’s tongue. Resentment, maybe. Disgust, certainly. But not rage. Not the furious anger needed to summon such a weapon. She tries to bring it back, to bear the absent flame once more. She bites her tongue, draws blood. She tries, dear reader. She tries to force her mind into that blade again, to keen herself as a weapon against someone who slights her. All she tastes is blood. 

The woman without the rifle disappears into the crowd. Sorrow had but a moment to enact Isosa’s will, to become like the paladins she admired. And she faltered. She looks up towards the Concordat of Miracles. It has turned away from her, keeping its forced vigil on the city of Mariposa. The sky is ablaze. She smells burning knowledge. Her hands are slick with blood. It is cold. Anathema.

A voice is heard emerging from the crowd and Sorrow snaps towards it. She tries to draw the gun again, this time not even thinking about it. She fails, of course. But she levels it against the voice all the same. Her fingers do not hesitate this time, finding what would have been the trigger.

She would have killed whatever it pointed at.

She would have killed the man standing in front of her. 

He is tall. His horns are sawn off and constantly bleeding. He is flanked on either side by a dwarf and a mechanized man. His own gun is pointing at the ground. He flinches when he hears her hammer click into place. He knows he is not safe.

It is Stolynn standing before her. He is a bastion of Mariposa. Large and furrowed brow. He looks down at her. She is still pulling the trigger, cycling the cylinder of a gun that has never existed. Her hands are dripping with blood. He extends a hand out towards her. She does not, she never does, take it.

The cylinder is still cycling. Click, click, click. They stand there for all too long. The wind howls between them, cut through by the cold, mechanical clicking of a gun that just isn't there.

“Are you alright, miss?” He asks. The gun is still firing dry. Sulfur and ash fill the air. The sky is still burning. His hand is trembling before her, flinching at every trigger pull.

She does not stop firing. Click. Her hands are dripping with cold blood. Click. Her voice is ragged with barely constrained rage. 

Click.

“It should have been me.”

[cupoftrembling]

Bonus

Hello dear reader,

I will begin posting some bonus content. They are not main stories, just little tidbits and fun things.

Brazen is the first of these.

Best,

A friend

[cupoftrembling]

Brazen

May I tell you my favorite joke from the Celestial Civil War?

Unlike many of the aggrandizement and hyperbole of the other stories from such a terrible, miserable war, this one has something I consider to be much more illuminating than the propaganda. Something that is of so much more use to us as investigators. Unlike the rest of the war, this joke actually has somewhat of a punchline.

So, can you allow me the pleasure? I don’t get to tell many jokes anymore.

…

Thank you, dear reader.

The Autumn Court had just accepted the Wolf’s Bargain. On the horizon, to the west, the sky burned. Castle Elphame was, of course, sheltered from this raging inferno. But each of the Summer Court knew that war would, eventually, be on their doorstep. They readied themselves for it. They brandished bronze blades, hardened wood into spears and armor, and steeled themselves to die in their Queen’s Name. Even Queen Titania, Queen of Storms, could feel it coming. 

She was reclining on a golden throne within the heart of Castle Elphame. All of her servants had either fled or been pressed into service. And so, she had to feed herself her grapes. She looked out the western window as the person who was to become Durandal played idly with a toy soldier at her feet. When her son entered her throne room, she didn’t even acknowledge him. Simply waved her hand dismissively, as if that was enough of a greeting.

“You called for me, mother?” Her son asked. He was a stout man. A red cap by the name of Tallulah Brightsky. His hammer was bigger than he was and it was sheathed on his back. Mattered and matted with autumn blood. His cap had been dyed red, his armor dented and burnt. It was as if the entire autumn court had turned feral all at once.

Queen Titania did not respond to him, not fully. “Look, my child, look at our kingdom.” She muttered. Tallulah was unsure of whom exactly he was talking to.

“The war goes well.” He responds. He wishes he could tell her that they will win. He wishes he could tell her that there is hope. These both would be lies. And he knows better than to unmake himself for such petty falsehoods. “My scouts predict that it will be over by the end of the day.”

“The day seems so long, my dear Brightsky.” The Queen turns towards him, the light of a burning Elphame on her face. She puts a grape in her own mouth like a child, like a pauper. “Isn’t there some way to expedite the process?”

“The Wolf ignores our missives. Our scouts return empty handed, if at all” Tallulah cringes. He does not tell her of how he found the scouts returned.

“Maybe the Goddess of Revolt needs a bit of a regal hand?” Titania rejoins.

Tallulah blinks twice. “Mother, I don’t think I understand.”

Titania rises from her throne, brilliant as a crack of lighting. She floats towards a nearby table. It is filled with all sorts of fruits and fine wines. Expensive treats and goods. Underneath it was a golden platter. It reflected the lights that haloed Titania’s head. She brings one of her thousand limbs down across it, knocking all the finery onto the ground with a brutal clatter. Tallulah flinches. From her belt, she draws a sword and places it upon the platter. She then uncouples the sheath from her belt and places it next to its sister. She then lifts the platter up and hands it to Tallulah Brightsky.

“I still don’t think I follow.”

“Think of it as a brazen gift, my child.” Titania responds, smile sharp enough to crack lightning. “We see the Wolf as madness. As roil and as chaos. But what if she is to be reasoned with?”

“I don’t know if Isosa would care for such talk, mother.” 

Titania continues smiling. Tallulah flinches. To the west, the sky continues to burn. “If she takes the sword, she is braced for war. And there is nothing we can do but defeat her.”

Tallulah looks at the sword on the platter. It is the sword that she promised him if he was to win this war. He looks back at his mother. “And the sheath?”

“The sheath means that she accepts our gift. And that she has the capability to listen to peace. That her war is not with us, but with Titania.”

Tallulah paces slightly in his spot. “And what do we do then?”

“We reassess!” Titania exclaims, too excited for her own good. “We see what we need to do to survive, like we always do.” She hands the platter to Tallulah. Durandal is now standing in the window, hands barely tall enough to reach the bannister. He is old enough for war, yet not yet Durandal as we understand him to be. He is wearing the garb of a child, stretched out far too much. It does not fit him anymore, despite his mothers protestations. He is growing older.

“Is this your will, my queen?” Tallulah asks, almost begging.

“It is.” She responds, turning back towards Durandal.

Tallulah sighs. He blinks once at Durandal. He blinks back at him. “Then I will do it.”

Titania does not see Tallulah until Castle Elphame falls. 

The walls have started to burn and she sits in the same throne room that he left her years ago. Durandal sits at her feet again, now a blade forged. He gleams in the light, silver with an iron grip. He burns to even look at. Tallulah looks beat. Tallulah looks bruised. Tallulah walks now with a limp. His hammer was dented and worn, dripping with void and blood. How many autumn fey did he kill to get here, I wonder.

Titania barely even looks at him. 

“Mother, where has-” He starts to ask.

“What did The Wolf say?” She interrupts him. “Did you find her?”

Tallulah flinches again. “I did.” He looks at Durandal.

“And?” The Queen asks again.

Tallulah pulls the sword from out of a bag. It is pristine and unused. Titania breathes a sigh of relief.

“Oh thank goodness, then this all wasn’t for naught. Then Durandal didn’t-” And then Tallulah pulls out the sheath from the bag on his back. Titania’s words drip from her mouth, unsure of what combination of shock and anger is adequate. “I thought you said you met with her?”

“I did.” Tallulah responds.

“Then why do you-”

“Mother, she took the plate.”

[cupoftrembling]

Awoke

There are many secret enclaves in the Eastern Kingdoms. 

Deep in the oceanic forests, there are hidden places where the light of truth so rarely touches. Amongst the titanic fauna and skyscraper trees, outside the enclaves of civility and civilization, outside the prying eyes of queens and tyrants, people move west, clamoring for a new chance at life. Many became exiles of the reclusive Eastern Kingdoms. Whether it be from the paladins of Isosa, casting them into the Wastes at the edge of the world, or from the cities built atop the trees who no longer belong there. Or from private things that might remain in their past. For centuries, much to the chagrin of the social scholars of the Eastern Kingdoms, the west has been perceived as a place where freedom can be found. So much so that it became the basis for multiple turns of phrase. Blinded by the future? Spent too much time staring west. Stumbled on the first step of a new beginning? Tripped over the western horizon. Don’t know where to start? You buried your dreams in the west. Even the fae lived over the horizon, stuck in diaspora after the Celestial Civil War consumed even their home. They writhe in the west, forever mourning their Elfame turned to soot and to ash and to gnashing teeth. The west was a home for these myths, things of non-existence that had no bearing on the lives of those toiling in the Eastern Kingdoms.

But the west was also home to Mariposa. 

A queendom of lies, of pure deceit. A city built on the guile of Queen Mariposa the Litigious at the dawn of time. It was a haven of mortal treachery, built on a smile and miles of wishes. It symbolized everything the west was for the people of the Eastern Kingdoms. A dangerous sort of wealth, a chance to be the boot instead of the neck, and a changing world. The Os’ Group, Vujčić Corporation, Tyra Logistics, these were the corporate lords of Mariposa and they were a force of constant change, of perfect rebelion, cycling in and out wealth from the world. These were the corporate lords who invaded the Eastern Kingdoms and even that could not stem the tide of those clamoring for such a life. If the east was stasis, the west was entropy, if the east was frost, the west was sweltering, if the east was the winter, then, in this metaphor and only in this metaphor, the west was summer. It was a place for the craven fools, clamoring for a better world.

This is what Saorise heard about the caravan traveling in the deep underbrush just outside Miro. She was sitting in some dusty little tavern at the ‘asses edge’ of the city, a tavern so un-important that the only record of its name remains within the pages of this book, a tavern called the Perilous Grift, named after the thief who helped the current owner swindle the deed from the previous one. The tavern was, as it always had been, almost empty. Saorise stumped across it in the cruelness of the morning, after a night of difficult drinking had brought her to the hazy, laden air of summertime that surrounded the Perilous Grift. This section of the city was held aloft by a titanic birch tree, where the roots of it were planted at the dawn of time by the Verdant Singer and Isosa. The air was thin up here, some few miles from off the forest floor. Overhead, streaking clouds caught the twilight sky, with flickering lightning bugs co-mingling with the stars above. 

Saorise stumbled, almost literally, through the fabric door of the tavern. Her tricorn hat hung gently on her belt, long having been discarded at the previous bar. And yet, maybe due to friendly circumstances, she had kept it. She had long ditched her traveling companions, who returned to the ship Primrose that was docked miles below, where the forest floor gave way to sandy, sunny beaches with scuttling crabs and dirges. She held the door frame with one spindly hand, her nails colored the same dusty amber as her hair. Her freckles melded with the blush of her sun-kissed and leathery skin, peering goldeyes spotting a discarded tankard of something nice and warm.

“We’re ‘bout closed, ma’am.” The tavernkeeper spoke in a soft, tired voice, without even looking up at whoever had entered. There were bags under his eyes, he slouched against the countertop now stained and sputtered with the revelries, or what else have you, of the night. There was nothing more appealing to the elf than sheltering into bed, closing the door and waiting for the cruel darling sun to rise the next morning in a hapless trance. What he first noticed was, upon her voice entering the bar, the candle flickering. Like a deluge of fresh air caught the flame. It burned brighter, almost warm enough to be felt from here.

He looked up at Saorise, half-slouched against the door frame and furrowed his brow. She was lanky, her face a little too long for her own good, too long to be around these parts. The thief what earned him this bar, he told me, lurched in the exact same manner. I know for a fact that Saorise, some seventy years ago when the tavernkeeper had come into possession of the Perilous Grift, was on the shores of the Alger’s Collective, drinking in the smoldering of a port town. But he swore, even if she looked nothing like that thief, there was something in how she stumbled, in how the fireflies avoided hallowing her hair, in how the tavern was just as empty as it was at that time, there was an echo there, a ripple across a dark pond. All else had been different, but this moment was frighteningly, almost too enticingly clear.

“Please, sir. Just a weary sailor, tired of a long campaign at sea. Spare one last drink?” She spoke with almost perfect clarity, her voice like nettles and warm grass. She was pittable, at least to him. And, like that day seventy years ago, he was nothing if not a kind man. He stood up, walked over to the other edge of the bar. A tacit invitation, but it was the best that she was getting. The floors were made from the same wood as the tree that supported them, originally supped from the grand Miro birch some three hundred and thirty six years ago, barring the occasional replaced board when the time had come.

 In fact, no less than thirty six original boards of the Miro heartwood remained within the Perilous Grift. Some were replaced during the Vujčić Fuckup, which had just concluded the year prior if royal documents from the royal archives of Miro are to be believed. A wayward Os Corp shell had caught the grand Miro Birch alight, and that summer had been an unseasonably dry one for the city so close to the wetlands of the Orchish Nomads. The city was still rebuilding, and records of its reconstruction are, unfortunately, kept from me by the Miro Dictorate. Other pieces of the original building had been lost to a plague of Sapphire Beetles, which skeletonized large swaths of the tree some twenty years ago, allowing the common observer to see the ground for some of the first times since the end of the Celestial Civil War. Even with many of its original, constituent parts missing, it was still the Perilous Grift. That had not changed, nor would it.

Saorise stumbled her way convincingly towards an empty stool. There were few people who ever made it to the Perilous Grift, especially tonight. Last night was the one year anniversary of the Winter Accords and, as such, all celebrations had long gone. The bartender long thought of closing up shop tonight, if only to restock his larder for the next week. An orc was sharing a nice glass of Fremens White with a portly human and an elf was humming gently to herself in the corner. “Whatcha drinking, miss?” The bartender asked, his back turned towards the sailor, reaching up upon the shelf. 

“Chaambry Licentious 38.” She asked, punctuating the year with a hiccup. “If not that, what swill do you stock?”

“Last of the Chaambry got drunk last night.” The bartender sighed, grabbing a bottle of rice wine from the shelf. “Try not to keep nothing Mariposian in here.”

“Bad memories?” Saorise placed her hands on the countertop, clumsily hoisting herself on the wobbly barstool. 

“Not keen on their booze. Got a fine Daysend Stout, if that entices you.”

“Aye, got your eyes hung west I take it?” She chuckled, thumbing the edge of the counter. “Yes, that’ll do.”

“Been to the breweries out there. Something special they do with the copper in their pipes.” The elf reached his hand for a mostly clean glass, brought it under the tap, and emptied the contents of his larder into it. “Stout as smooth as chocolate, hint of oil along the top makes a delineation in the ethanol and the flavor. ‘Least, on the tongue it does.”

Saorise glanced around the Perilous Grift. It was, for a small bar, sparsely decorated. No bric-a-brac or tchotchkes, no photos of grand adventures or places, not even any artwork. It was grandly utilitarian. “Yea, the machinery of Daysend certainly has that effect.” She smiled, taking the glass from his hands. The head consisted of almost half the volume of the liquid, and it would take some time for the hoppy fizzing to subside enough for our sailor to drink it. It was the type of pour that would be given by someone who hates you, someone who’s very presence makes you sick. In certain, craven places along the Cambian Coast or deep in the Alger’s Collective, it was an instigation for conflict, a call to respond to. “Stranger are ya?” Saorise asked, bringing the fizzing glass to her lips, tickling the back of her throat. 

“To you?” The bartender chided, nodding to the elf and the orc now leaving the bar. Regulars, one can assume. It was late, and all people of good sense would have gone home long ago. “I don’t think we’ve met before.”

“To the region. You don’t pour your drinks like someone from the Kingdoms.”

“Can tell a lot about a person in how they pour their liquor?”

Saorise leaned backwards, pulling the front two legs of the table off the floor, digging the back into the soft wood below. Her foot balanced against the counter in such a way that made the brow of the bartender furrow. He would have to clean it later, that he was sure. This sailor, who knew where her boots had tread. What she might track in from the muck of the forest floor. “Can tell when someone who ought to know better clearly refuses to.” She muttered, placing the glass on the countertop.

The bartender sighed. “Miss, it is late. Drink’s on me, but you have to go.” He motioned towards the door with his free hand. 

“Go where?” She smiled, hand still wrapped around the frosty glass.

“Somewhere that isn’t here. I know there’s a bar down the road that’s open all hours. Great for folks like you.”

“Folks like me?”

“Folks in the employ of Large Marge, that is.” The bartender squinted. He eyes her spindly fingers, the flickering wick of the candle that had burnt down at least half its length in her short stay. His eyes hung low against the assumed bruiser. “Of the same ken. I’m sure you’d be a bit more comfortable at the Red Cap.”

“You take me for a wintered soul?”

The bartender chuffed. She was a pill, that was for sure. His eyes glazed over with disappointment. Another busybody here to collect, here to flex some muscle. If it were earlier in the night, if there were not dishes to clean or floors to mop, maybe he’d be scared. But spending the night in the local clinic would spare him from the responsibility, and from whatever contract bound him. “It is February, isn’t it?”

“You must know,” Saorise placed the glass down on the counter. It sweat with condensation in the cold night air, and the sailor’s hands were fully dry. “Awfully rude to turn away a good neighbor. Especially when I darken your door at such a late hour.”

The bartender glanced towards the clock hung on the wall. It was of fine Imperial make, a gift when he received this establishment. This woman was clearly from over the horizon, yet he could not find it in himself to truly care. “I’m tired, miss. And I need to get this shop closed up. However rude you perceive me to-”

“Perceive?” Saorise interrupts him, the candle besides him flickers again. “Well, now that’s rich.”

“Tell your boss I have what she needs.” The bartender continued, bringing the glass in his hand down to punctuate his sentence. “She can still spend it tomorrow. It will still be here tomorrow.”

Saorise placed all four legs of her stool on the ground. She paused for a second, breath caught in her lungs, a small smile caught her face. “The person I answer to. She is searching for, well, something else.”

The bartender raised an eyebrow, leaning over the counter. She looked fit, of course. Sinewy muscle laid beneath her skin. But, he was a soldier once, even practiced a bit of magic when it was necessary. He could have taken her, and if he didn’t, then he was sure she would not get far. She was not armed, like Large Marge or any of her associates usually were. He knew the stories of the winter fae, unseelie in the old tongue. Could break a man with a glance, leave him gibbering and mad. If it was her boss, or the man who came to him with his original offer it would be a different story. But she looked young, new to this whole thing. It would take more than some busybody to keep him troubled.“I’ve gone to great lengths to get your employer what was asked of me. Now, you walk in at three in the morning and ask for something else at short notice?”

Saorise glanced around the bar. The human had left when neither were paying attention, stumbled across the square towards some other excitement. They were, for a moment, alone. Even the wind stilled, if to give them some privacy. The candle had burnt down to its base, now just a pile of oil and fat. Yet it still burnt, smoldering a wick now turning to ash. “Something tells me that you already have what I was sent to receive.”

“Ominous.” The bartender said to no one in particular, keen to get her out of his establishment. The thief who earned him this bar always looked for something else whenever she could. He always thought it was a power play, to prove that one could eke out something that was not promised. “And the original arrangement, does that still stand?”

Saorise placed her left hand to her chest, holding her right in a solemn vow. “I promise, I will leave this place with what I have came for and nothing more. To ask any more of you, when I am so clearly intruding, would just be…” She let the pause sit on her tongue, swirling it around like a fine wine. It had a bouquet of death, like many things did in this world. The pause would seal fates and end stories, as all good pauses did. “Impolite.” A toothy grin crept across her face. It was warm like a fire, sapping the heat from the candle that, at long last, went out. It was an old expression, older than time itself. Borrowed from Queen Mariposa the Litigious, who is depicted only ever with a wide, brilliant smirk across her face. Every depiction of her shows her trickery, how she bound even the gods into deceit and contract. The Litigation’s Grin, it was forever known. A huckster’s friend, it betrayed Saorise’s regal tendencies.

“Very well.” The bartender muttered to himself, the facial expression’s history lost upon him. “What is it that I can do for you, miss?” ------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A week later, deep in the most western parts of the Miro Dictorate, Saorise sat alone in a large birch branch, some hundreds of feet above the ground. Her legs dangled above the abyss, the ground beneath seeming both too far and too close all at once. It was winter in the Eastern Kingdoms, but the snowfall barely ever pierced the canopy vista of the grand oceanic trees. The lower branches, starved for light and densely woven together as they were, were covered in a slick coating of mid-morning frost. It dripped from the trees in little pearls, catching whatever strands of light pierce through the tree cover in fractal diffusion. The forest floor, on the other hand, was shadowed by the swaths of canopy. The only light brightening up the dark, shadowed places of the Miro Dictorate was from a single, smokeless fire. 

Around it, six huddled forms, too far for Saorise to make out any distinguishing marks. The fire cut through the mid-morning darkness, peering its light around branches and foliage. She could see the long, stretching shadows of the figures, flickering and dancing among the frost-laiden floor. It was almost blinding, it was a searchlight through a troublesome sea. No one traveled on foot through the forests of the Eastern Kingdoms. Not bandits, not thieves, not rebels. Even during Mariposa’s incursion into the hermit kingdoms, the Grand Butterfly’s mercenary army traveled upon the backs of the grand oryx that towered even above the birches of the Miro Dictorate. Only the truly desperate would walk among the forest floor. To do so is to invite all sorts of visitors, for it was their home you walked through. It was the home of the creeping things, the crawling things that were left behind in the flotsam of the Celestial Civil War.

The frost on the branch beneath Saorise had long faded away, the ambient temperature around her rose some twenty some degrees just by her idleness. Her head was quirked at the travelers. Desperate, yes. But without that bartender’s information, she would never have found them. An old smugglers’ route, partially underground, partially following certain warded sections of the forest floor. On the tree branch beside her, one of the old wards blew gently in the wind. Frost had long sapped into its paper, thickening the strands, loosening their bonds with one another. It no longer held any true power, as evident by Saorise’s proximity. But those who lurked in the forest were held by tradition. And this place had long been taboo. It is safer here, in no man's land.

Saorise looked at the ancient sigil as it gracelessly faded away, finally giving way to the elements. It was safer here, once. But time had crept in to this place, as it did with all things. Soured it, perverted the sentimentality and the warmth. The wind blew cold. Saorise stood up from her position, wobbled a bit in the wind. She quickly steadied herself, but that memory remained. In a moment, and only for a moment, she was unmoored, she had the potential to fall. But that moment, as all do, passed. And she was still. 

Besides her, the branch hefted in weight. It was a familiar sound, as she had heard that same weight hit the decks of a ship in boarding and she had heard it stomping above her as she sat in the hull. “Lucius.” She said in flat affect, not turning around.

The first mate, Lucius, placed a gloved hand on her shoulder. His hair was a golden yellow, even in the dull chill of the mid-morning forest air. His face was angular and gaunt, chiseled lightly and gently with an artist’s kindness. On his head, weaved in his hair, were red primrose. On his belt was a spyglass and a cutlass, both tools that Capitan Saorise had seen him use many times. The blade of the cutlass was jagged obsidian, forged, like its wielder, from a single piece. A gift he kept on him at all times. “You seem cold, Capitan.” He muttered, placing his hand on the spyglass. “Shall I fetch your red coat?”

Saorise smiled at her first mate like one would a street cat, belly turned towards the sun in a contented bliss. “You are such a careful sort, Lulu.” She snickers. “I’m quite alright, but thank you.”

Lucius bristled, only slightly, at that rather twee nickname. “The rest of the Primrose is on the floor, waiting for your mark.” He remarked, glancing down at the traveling caravan below them. “Goshawk is on rear-guard, making sure no beasties keep up behind us.”

Saorise was silent, letting the wind whip around the two of them. Her legs dangled in the twisting, harmonic breeze. “Woulda rather had him here, with us.”

Lucius sighed, bristling at the capitan’s disappointment. “I’ll make your displeasure known, but he insisted on teaching the wild troops here some civility.”

“There are no wild troops here, Lulu.” Saorise remarked. She looked around the forest floor. There were no echoes of battle, no grand cacophony of might. This was not like when the violent shores lapped against the hull of the Primrose, this was not the sublimating water beneath the fellow Outrider Knights on a common battlefield.  “We’re in hostile territory, if we were found-”

“We will not be found.” Lucius interrupts his capitan. He sees the same thing that Saorise does, the nightmares that lurk deep within the forests that these mortal Eastern Kingdoms lurk in. Squat in. He knows that, if they were so interested, the walls that these Kingdoms had built would not stand against the Winter wilds. Neither would they. The Primrose were guests here, in these woods. “Apologies sir, but I have the utmost faith in your crew.”

There is a breath of silence here. The fire below on the forest floor crackles. The figures look furtive, huddled around the last vestiges of warmth in this desolate place where not even sunlight could reach them. It could have been the middle of the night, it could have been three hours past noon. The forest swallowed all light and made it impossible to tell. And yet, this caravan was trying to carry it into its depths, in some sort of vain hope that this gift would protect them. Fire was the aspect of The Wolf, an end implied by its eventual burning out. It is the antithesis of the stasis of these forests. 

Saorise spoke after that moment of quiet. “Do you know who these people are, below us?”

Lucius looked out towards what would have been the horizon, now blocked by miles and miles of tree cover. His eyes were keen and sure, not a moment of hesitation held in his chest. “Your quarry.”

Saorise laughed at his certainty. “Is that all you need to know?”

“Aye.” Lucius responded, grimacing at her prying questions. 

“You would not question if I send you to your death, or them to theirs?”

The wind whistled around them again, unmooring Lucius from his position, feet slipping somewhat on the icy branch. He steadies himself, hand on his cutlass. “You’re my captain, sir. It is the only rationale I would want.”

“There could be a better life,” Saorise looked down at the flickering flame below them. She pulls away from Lucius’ hand on her shoulder, and he held it just above her in something that approximated pain. She was talking to herself now, not to Lucius, not to the branches, not to the forest, and almost certainly not to me. “One where our people, so few we are, wouldn’t kill each other, wouldn’t be locked in this endless war.”

Lucius paused for a moment, hearing the ragged breath coming from his capitan. “Is it a world you want?”

“It is a world I want to want.” She muttered. “But I am beholden to my queen. And these fae below us are not…” She trailed off, leaving the violence in her words only merely implied.

Lucius looks back down to the caravan below them, not even wondering who they were. His mind was arush with battle planning and tactics and victory far too much to consider what his capitan implied. “Then I am beholden to you.”

Saorise stood from her position on the branch, a disappointed grimace plastered on her face. Her arms were now crossed, watching the ever flickering flame like a candle, just so beyond her reach. Always beyond her reach. “You may wish for a blind death, Lulu, it is allowed.”

“I do not wish for a thing other than what you want for me, Saorise.”

She frowned at his statement and turned towards him. She raises a hand to his face and, for a moment, thinks to strike him. An echo of cruelty, she is certain, inflicted upon her people by The Wolf, and then by her queen. Lucius clearly shares the thought with her, as he flinches from her touch. Instead, she cups the edge of his face, the warmth of her hand almost burning the skin on his chin. It was so warm, dear reader, so cruelly warm. At first, like anyone starved for warmth, anyone who spent an eternity in the cold, the heat was invigorating. It sent the nerves in Lucius’ mind on edge, sent him reeling across the winds and lit him with the same fire he was sure burned within his dear capitan. It was the warmth that many fell for. Followers of The Wolf often spoke of her intoxicating presence, the aura of pure invictus that burned even to look at. When I saw her last, dirty in the muck of the burning Elfame, she shown with such brilliance. A stubborn sureness that could only be snuffed out one way.

It was sickening.

It was sickening because after you were warmed by it, after it had touched every part of who you are, infected your soul and crawled its way into your chest and tricked you into thinking that warmth is what made you a better person, that is when your senses would give way to flames. That is when you realized that it caught you, that it has spread itself to every inch of your skin, covering you in ash and soot. It burnt you out, it burnt her out, it burnt every one. The Wolf burned so brightly that even now, we can not escape her. I imagine that is how, in that moment, Lucius felt. The moment before Saorise had a chance to burn him, that knife’s edge where he would fall into her, he knew everything he was, it was hers.

 For a moment, they were both tricked by the flame, Saorise had fallen for her own ruse. There was a moment, a moment that at that instant always existed, where they could be something other than this. 

And then her touch began to burn. And Lucius pulled away from her gentle embrace in a reflex, cheek singed and primroses in his hair smoldering. He realized what came over him after a moment and nestled his head back in her hand, despite any good sense. Saorise saw him flinch at her fire and that illusion was shattered. Saorise would only burn him. And he would be happy to suffer such a fate. Her hand dropped and Lucius began to cry, tears sublimating on his cheek.

“Lucius…” She said, beginning an apology. She started to reach out again and then her words caught in her throat. She would only harm him, and he would welcome it, but she would not be the sword he would fall on. “We… we need to go. Our Queen waits for news.”

Lucius composes himself, but he stares intently at the hand that once burned him. “After -sniff- you, capitan.” The fire below the two of them now turned cruel, its orange and reds no longer echoing the setting of the sun of the west. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There is no need to describe the battle. 

Saorise was a seasoned veteran of many wars and one of the famed and deadly Outrider Knights of Ashosh Ai. She had twelve members of the Primrose at her side and, while not each of them fey in nature, had fought at their capitan’s side everywhere  from the Siege of Tashi to the Cambian Coast. The six individuals who traveled a dangerous road through the forest floors of the Eastern Kingdoms were half-starved and cold. One was a poet, another a jeweler, three more of such little note that I have no indication or idea of who they actually were. At their defense, was a single soldier of Ashosh Ai who had fled with them. He held a shaking blade made of ironwood and threw bags of salt that burnt his hands to ward off any sort of fell beasts that resided in this forest. This was not a level competition, not a skilled bladelocking of two evenly matched opponents. 

There is no thrill in slaughter, and I will not indulge your worst instincts, dear reader. The Primrose had brought a poet along to write of this battle in song, to be memorialized for all times their deeds. Listen to it, if you want. They sing it in the halls of Ashosh Ai at the feet of Queen Titania and the nobles clap at such victories for their court. That is their currency, fame and legend. Fiction. I am a historian, not a skald. They would want me to relish in the details. That is not my purpose.

But written or not, song sung or unsung, those six fey were dead. They bled their last on the forest floor of a foreign nation on a plane that was not their own. Their essence now mixing with the foul earth that kept them trapped here in diaspora, fated never to be in any sort of home ever again. Saorise stood over the corpse of the soldier from Ashosh Ai. She knew him, once. They shared a drink and more some years after the Peril Heist that shook the small island to its core. 

She remembered his hair being lighter, almost metallic weaves of golden rod twisted into a brilliant Mariposian braid. She remembered how warm his cheeks were in the light of the mess hall where they gathered. But here, in the muck of the forest floor, his luster was gone. His braid had been shorn off in an attempt to distance himself from the person he once was. He was now covered head to toe in the licks of Saorise’s flames, a conflagration that only at the last moment he knew was familiar. He couldn’t even work up the courage to curse her with his dying breath. She knew his name then, but now he was someone different. And neither she nor I will call him by something he was not. 

That fire that looked so large in the distance seemed smaller from down here. The twelve members of the Primrose barely stood around the entire thing shoulder to shoulder, heaving the belongings of the caravan into the fire’s waiting maw. It gulped them down greedily, feeding itself off the people that had originally brought it into being. Saorise gently tapped the soldier with her staff in some attempt to gauge whether or not he still lived, as if anyone could have lived from that tempestuous fire. She was bleeding, his sword errantly and weakly slashed across her chest. Barely enough to cause any sort of issue. Lucius eyed it with some concern, hovering just out of sight of his capitan. 

“Leave them where they lay.” She muttered to her first mate. “Take their belongings but leave the corpses for the forest.”

Lucius was surprised for a moment. Queen Titania had tasked them with bringing these traitors back as a show of force, mounting their heads on spikes outside of Ashosh Ai. But Queen Titania was not here, in the outlands they are supposed to default to the orders of the captains. He bowed his head somewhat and turned towards the rest of the crew. The fire flickered as it rose, higher and higher, consuming the bones and clothing of those fey who wished for something more than this. The shadows of Saorise and her crew stretch long across the forest floor, dancing between the titanic trunks of with every wild lick of flame. Behind her, one of her crew was rummaging through the belongings of the slain party. An orc who joined up with Saorise during the Siege of Tashi. He was young, barely growing tusks. He found little trinkets and baubles, things touched by and stolen from Ashosh Ai. He looked up at his capitan, and saw her glancing down down at the fey now smoldering at her feet, wind whipping around the two of them, howling like laughter.

The fey was clutching something in his hand, skin carbonized around a piece of paper. It stuck out, bone white against the blackened flesh and charred wood of his armor. It caught Saorise’s eye, like gold glimmering through soot. She bent down and tugged on the edge. The hand resisted her ministrations for only a moment, desperately trying to keep his last secret. And yet, even it gave way to the fire, collapsing into tempered ash. The paper was, surprisingly, unscarred by the heat. It was the ambient temperature of the winter’s air that surrounded them, although some deep part of Saorise knew it was always that temperature, regardless of the day or weather. Her index and middle finger grabbed the edges, with the grace only one touched by a queen could accomplish. She knew Unseelie magicks intimately, and this paper was no exception. It has been touched by the Winter’s Queen, either directly or through proxy. One of those outcomes is unsettling, the other is death. But yet, the paper felt right between her fingers, like it had always belonged there. Her shadow stretched far, a pantomime of the fire burning behind her. It danced treacherously on the tree in front of her, taunting her with all sorts of injustice. In her mind, she pictured herself burning the paper right there, forever remaining incurious of its contents. 

Saorise was too much of a coward for that.

If there is a secret it should be revealed, if there was a mystery it should be uncovered. She was never strong enough for uncertainty, she never allowed herself the blissfulness of peace and ignorance. Lucius was behind her, hefting a pouch of thirty Miro Stone in his hand, the silver minted with the icon of Fuyuki the Ignoble, pauper king of Miro’s third branch. For a moment, he wished to give it to his capitan, to add to their collective. But how the light caught it, how the shimmering fractline frost covered the face of Fuyuki the Ignoble made him pause. He glanced back up at his capitan and, for the first time, he pocketed the Stone, placing it deep within his coat.

Saorise brought the paper into the palm of her hand, cradling it like a broken bird needing pity. It was folded over on itself, the wind catching the edge, flickering and threatening to open on its own. She held it close to her breast, like fire in the palm of her hand, until its frost had burnt her, singed the edges of her fingers with its chill. She fought the urge to drop it, to pull away and recoil. She sat with the pain until her fingers were numb. And then, after her body and mind could take no more, she opened the letter, written by no one and with no recipient. Her eyes darted across its contents, filling them with the same frost singing her hands. It spoke of secret things, of a secret place to the west surrounded by stone and by iron. It filled her mind with furtive thoughts, of stealing away to a place where her flame could burn no one, hurt no one. Then, without thinking, she pocketed the letter and looked west for just a moment. She thought of a better world, dear reader. And for a moment, that better world was possible.

Then she turned around.

She saw her first mate. Who her queen had hewn from a prized tree of her own garden, who had served as her helmsman for nigh on three hundred years, who was a symbol of the Primrose and their loyalty to each other. A symbol of the Primrose’s loyalty to their queen. She looked him deep in the eyes, hands trembling around the crushed paper in her fist, frost dripping from between her tight, cruel grip. His eyes flicked downwards and, in that moment, she knew beyond knowing.

She knew that better world would not be possible. At least, not now.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The letter lay open on a marble column, now sapped of its chill. It was warm in the mid-spring sun, pages once warped by the thawing ice. The dawn had broken through the limited cloud-cover and the mournful song of Rose the Everpoet hung low in the sky of Ashosh Ai. Saorise sat in a regal garden, her hands on her knees and her eyes staring intently on a beetle eating a small blade of grass. Its shell was emerald and after every bite the greenery regrew, forever feeding the beetle. Its stomach was fat and gorged with eternity, forever living its life on that single piece of greenery.

She had seen that beetle every time she was summoned to this garden. Each time, she wished to extend a curled finger, pluck him from his eternal vigil. Have him wind himself down her arm, to sprout wings and take flight on the Ashosh Ai winds towards the west, melting into the pinprick stars that always permeated the sky above the reclusive island, no matter the time nor weather. 

Her hand did not move, however. It remained clenched around her knee, foot tapping impatiently and in unsteady tempo. Despite her best efforts, and she really did try, it matched effortlessly with Rose’s dulcet song, footfalls syncopating between the long, drawn out lyrics wafting on the wind. The song eluded description, as its lyrics and melody adapted for whoever was listening. It was weaponized nostalgia, a psychosocial contagion tailor made to unsettle and discontent. It elicited deep, resounding sorrow in anyone who heard lacking a strong enough will, echoing the events of the listeners past with every note and word. What I heard, what Saorise heard, and what Rose the Everpoet was actually singing were three entirely different things, realities that could not be reconciled. It kept the fey of Ashosh Ai separate from one another, each within tailor made realities that only they could understand. There was no place on the archipelago where the Everpoet’s song could not be heard, the spirit trapped within Oberon’s Tower at the center of the largest island of Ashosh Ai drawing all in like a lighthouse, emotion churning like Charybdis around the Isle of Storms.

At yet here, at the center of the storm that is Queen Titania’s rule, that voice sounded so distant. She could be anywhere in this garden, and Saorise could never have met her. She had ideas of what the Everpoet could have looked like, each, like the song, tainted and colored by the captain's previous experiences. She pictured Rose with long, waist length hair and a kind, tear stained face. She pictured her with her harp, reclining against it during moments of fitful, brackish rest, eating glassgrapes and pining apples off of copper trays with tweezers and tongs, her hands stuck in an eternal bow-holding position. She pictured her in ways that she could not have existed in, as the memory of the Everpoet was the only place she could live. And the songs, themselves, are nothing but echoes of something that could not live on the Shattered Planes, their music too chemically pure for the tainted, warbled language of the mortal world.

“Are you enjoying the music, Bitterblossom?” A voice like glass bells cut through the music. The consonants were sharp like cracking lighting, the vowels deep like the churning sea, syllables too delicate to be anything but flinched at. Saorise did not look towards the speaker, the voice eminently familiar to the outrider knight. She caught a glimpse of the bare feet ghosting along the grass, crushing the beetle with her first step, the heel digging into the grass, snuffing out the life eternal of the gorged beast. Her feet came up with the next step and a second creature climbed the now bent stalk, taking its place.

“Always, my queen.” Saorise bowed her head further, eyes refusing to look at the subject but sense refusing to not keep her in sight. Some deep part of her knew that whatever was before her was some sort of primal threat, that she a prey animal at the mercy of the Queen’s predation, Saorise’s life now predicated on whatever strange mixture of mercy and curiosity that Titania’s contained. She settled on looking at the Queen’s gloved hand, wrapped in fine silk like a funerary garb. The gloves creep themselves up the arm, embossed in gold filigree, secant tracery climbing up the sleeves in perfect, natural mathematics. It shifted in the twilight air, catching errant rays of moonlight to further curl their gilded leaves across the delicate fabrics. Around her ring finger, a twisted and warped wooden band of matrimony, older than all things and always at the verge of breaking. 

A glance of saccharine red lips twisting themselves into a smile. “She is something to behold.” The voice spoke to no one in particular, like an appraiser enjoying something of her collection. “A rare jewel from the War.”

Saroise knew better than to ask which war she was speaking of. Instead, she paused for a moment, trying to talk about anything other than why she was here. “Is this song from the war as well?” 

The smile turned sour for a moment, a brief crack of lighting echos off from somewhere deep and far in the sea. Her hand places itself on her son, Durandal, on the silver of his hilt. She looks along his blade, all one mercurial piece of silvered starlight forged from a singular, precious moment. He hung at Titania’s side off of nothing, simply willing himself to always be at her side, ready for violence.“Unfortunately no. For all that I try, the Everpoet only sings to me of now and not then.”

“My apologies, my queen.”

“Do you have something to apologize for?” She seemingly responds before the words have finished finalizing themselves in the air. She was the true master of this domain, even linguistics, once freed from their original master’s lips, were hers to control. Only pauses in conversations were for violence and for thought.

Saorise swallows heavy, air feeling fallow on the lung. “I have been true to myself, and my self is yours.”

The clink of Durandal against the metal of Titania’s ring as her hand adjusts on his pommel, her lips curled into a smirk. Behind them, the ferns that lined this garden shuddered on the still wind. “You have given yourself to me, a gift as kind as I am.” Her words curdle on the ear, her breath gentle against the nape of Saorise’s neck. She dares not look away from the beetle in front of her, stepping over the crushed and broken body of his once eternal partner. With gentle mandible, he lifts the viscera stained grass to his mouth and bites down.

“You are my queen, true queen of all fae they call you. I do what you abide.”

“Do you call me that?” Her hand finds itself on Saorise’s shoulder, spindly fingers curling with the capitan’s braided hair. There is an echo when the sentence ends, a gap between a hypothetical comma and the question mark. A liminal space where a name might live. A threat, implied in the margins.

“I gave you my name,” Saorise gasps out, fighting every instinct to pull away or lean in. She stayed there, completely motionless. Behind the two of them, Rose the Everpoet’s song ended, leaving a sickening silence rarely felt on Ashosh Ai. “I have nothing else for you but to be your servant.”

“Do you know what your first mate gave me?” She responds, now far away. There is a ghost of sensation along Saorise’s shoulder, lighting cracking across the edge of who she is. Titania walks out of Saorise’s eyesight, leaving only a trail of summer flowers and fine silk in her wake. The grass sprouts with milkweeds that bloom, seed, and then die in the span of moments.

“He gives tithes to many, my queen.” Saorise rubs her elbow with her gloved hand. She is underdressed for such a meeting, still in her sea-fairing apparel. Her eyes break from the bits of Titania she will accept, looking back towards the letter on the marble besides her. “He is his own.”

“Well, I was hoping that you would give it to me.” She sighs, gloved fingers now crawling back into frame onto the marble column. They wind themselves across the discarded page, then crumble them in a moment of pure violence. “You ought to control him better.”

For a moment, Saorise bites her tongue. She bites it so hard, dear reader, that she draws blood. It leaks from her mouth like milk, staining her chin with rivulets.  “I will do better, my queen.” The hand draws the paper out of sight, quickly, like a spider pulling its prey down its hole.

“It isn’t your fault, Bitterblossom.” Titania pulls away from behind Saorise’s ear. “It is so hard to control oneself sometimes. I can hardly think to blame him when I see him rutting like some sort of dog. It is what this place does to us.”

“What it has done to us.” Saorise mutters. She knows it isn’t to herself, even one’s breath here is owned. From behind her, the paper crumbles, the air is silent, then a crackle of thunder. On the tongue, on the edges of Saroise’s blood, she tastes lighting arcing in the air. Ozone burning and a moment split in two.

“The letter, it was interesting.” Titania continues, ignoring whatever her outrider knight had mentioned. Or rather, opting to ignore. “Do you know what it said?”

Saorise flinches. “I’m not sure I follow.”

“Do you know what it says?” Titania asks again. Saorise tries to look at her queen out of the corner of her eye, to keep her in view at all times.

“I do not understand the question, my queen.” Her shoulders are tense in the not quite lie. She feels the ghost of Titania’s hands around her neck, pulling the answer from its home. Her words are drug out, her words are choked and forceful. There is a compulsion in three that Saorise needs to answer by her blood and by her kin. She knows what slight her queen commands of her. Her fingers dig into the fleshy palm of her hand, but blood does not draw. Even here, her body is not her own to destroy.

Saorise can hear the smirk behind her as her queen’s question precipitates itself. “Do you know what it says?”

Saorise drops to her knees, falling against the grasses. In front of her, the beetle has consumed its brethren whole. It is crying and its mandibles are stained green with blood. The world is spinning, Saorise is spinning, the grass is no cold comfort, no anchor to reality. She feels existence against the back of her eyes, an endless, ceaseless pressure of her very being. There is a quickening in her blood, in the very spirit that makes up Saorise that demands she answers. It gives her two options: She can either tell the truth or be unmade. 

And Saorise always tells her the truth.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Brothers! Sisters! Fair Folk of Ashosh Ai! Fair Folk of the Eastern Kingdoms! There is a better world, unfettered by the yolk of time’s cruel oppression.”

Saorise’s eyes darted across its contents, filling them with the same frost singing her hands. It spoke of secret things, of a secret place to the west surrounded by stone and by iron.

“Brothers, Sisters! In Mariposa, a new world is forming! Deep beneath the iron and the stone of the Great Butterfly where every fae can live in brutal peace with one’s self!”

 It filled her mind with furtive thoughts, of stealing away to a place where her flame could burn no one, hurt no one. 

“Winter, Summer, Autumn, Spring, each court is welcome in this new world! A Nixed world where you can breathe new life, unshackled by our history!”

Then, without thinking, she pocketed the letter and looked west for just a moment. 

“Come to Mariposa, seek out the Nix Court and her Queen. There, we can build this new world, together!”

Then she turned around.

“If you love yourself, if you ever loved the fae. 

Find me. And you will drink honeywine like water”

And she knew that better world would never be possible.

“With love and adulation for our people,

Maeve of the Nix Court.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Saorise sat there, twitching out what she had read, sputtering it raw and fallow onto the grass below her mouth. The words fell from her lips and stained the greenery with their truth. Bile rose in the back of her throat, her whole body felt numb, like it was on distant shores. Her head was spinning, her mind was spinning, her chest was spinning. The truth that had been forced from her sat plain in front of Saorise, mixing with the vomit she had expelled during her ill-lucidity.

“Yes,” Queen Titania said, standing over her. Saorise raised her eyes too tired to look at her, but she was naught but shadows, the sun hanging low above the Queen of Storm’s head. “That is what I thought I read.”

Saorise did not respond, merely wiping the vomit from her lips. It was not the first time that she had experienced the compulsion of three. But a violation like that, it never got any easier. 

“Do you know who that woman was? Who had written the letter?” Titania continued. She circled the supine Saorise like a buzzard, like a man, like an animal circling a wounded beast.

“The, ah.” Saorise chokes on her own words for a moment. She braces herself on an arm, the grass stinging like needles and like flies. “The queen-”

“The woman.” Titania interjects, her words as sharp as her sword. 

“The woman who has been poaching our people.” Saorise continues.”

“Leading them to a death of inches in a foreign land.” Titania sighs and looks upward. From this vantage, the only thing Saorise can see is the point of Durandal. “I weep for those misguided souls, I even weep for this Maeve, who styles herself the Red Queen. They are of my flock and I can no longer reach them.”

“It is a shame, my queen.” Saorise says, unsure whether or not she could. If it were a lie, if there was no basis of truth, the words could not have escaped her lips. If it was fully the truth, well, why hide the note?

“It is a shame!” Titania extended a hand down towards her outrider knight. “It is a shame what grief does to these fae. I weep for them, for despair has tricked them, like it tries to trick you or me.”

Saorise looks at the hand in front of her. “I’m… I do not understand what you are getting at, my queen. Is this a threat? Am I in some sort of trouble?”

“Oh heavens no, no no no!” Titania held her hand even further down towards Saorise. And then, in a moment, the sun shifted from behind her. And Saorise’s eyes forced her to focus. The queen was beautiful, with limbs reaching like raucous Lichtenberg figures. Her teeth were rows and rows and rows of perfect, pristine marble and her fingers were many knives which caught the brilliance of the Queen of Storms. It was the last thing Saorise ever seen and she saw it in its entirety. No filter, no veil to be hidden behind. 

There was no glamor between the two of them, each of their illusions having been blasted off in a single, brilliant light of remaking. Only their true, primal forms remained, their untruth’s shadowed against the grass behind them. It was the light of truth that Saorise saw and it was miserable.

“No, I wish to reward you. Now, we know where this Red Bitch is.” Titania paused, shaking her hand expectantly at Saorise. The outrider knight thought for a moment and then, without thinking, reached up towards her. “And you can kill her.”

“Yes my queen.” She says with nothing but pure devotion. It is a devotion truer and crueler than anything I’ve ever known. More than petty obligation or simple sycophancy, more than anything innate to who or what the fae are, more than any boring, simple reason that one might conjure. It was love. A love that could twist and pervert any sort of sentimentality, love born from pure desperation and unmooring winds. It was the kind of love that could snuff out any fire, no matter how bright. “Anything for you.”

“And I will need you, oh Callan mine. To do this for me. To break apart this Nix Court, to find the seat of its power and to snuff it out. And then we can be whole again.”

Callan looked up at his queen and did not understand. He looked down at his hands, now different than what he had entered this garden with. He clamored over, still on his knees, to a nearby pond. Its surface rippled and warped his visage. He had kept his red hair, but not its length. His skin now more golden, less sunkissed. The light of the twin moon and sun above Asosh Ai caught his hair, illuminating it like a forest on fire. They danced above him, haloing his head in delicate dance of ghostlight. His cheeks were more gaunt, besotted with freckles and marks. But all else was lost to Callan, as he could not draw his attention away from his grin. His toothy, Litigious grin. It crept from ear to ear, a smile far too wide and too saturated with history. He had been remade before, but never with such careful precision, never with such delicate intricacies. It felt more right than his other faces, yet still a stranger. He looked back towards where his queen was, who was now awash with tears at her outrider knight. Her eyes were swollen and her smile was genuine and surprised. Even this was not a form she could have foreseen, and her cheeks were forever stained with tears.

“I am to bring what this Maeve has stolen from you home?” His voice was snakelike and velvet, dripping with misdirection.

“Yes, my Callan.” She spoke, her grandeur almost succeeding in disguising a surprised lilt at the edges of her voice. If she were a smaller, crueler fae, as she once was in her youth, she would peel the skin from his face with curved bone, remake him into something more divine and pristine. The screams would echo off the towers of Ashosh Ai as she carved the raw marble of Callan into a pure sculpture. Something she could mold with her own six hands. But that was so many years ago, and she was not that fae. Not any more.

But that smile, the moment her eyes fell upon it. She could have sworn she was there again, at Castle Elphame, at the betrayal of the Autumn Fae and the awakening of her son. She swore she could see herself in that fire, within its mirror like aurora. She should have known what that smile had meant, how that fire had now engulfed her too. She would have crackled lighting, she would have left him a shadow against the wall. 

But he was kneeling there, grinning up at her, soot and ash pooling at his feet and hands and knees. His hands intertwined with the grass, knuckles white and tight in what only could be devotion. His teeth clenched in fervor, his eyes squinted with adulation. He was a relic of an older, better world. And the edges of her skin felt that warmth, that delineation between sense and pain as the flames crackled between the two of them.

And they both stayed there, until that litigious grin began to burn.

[cupoftrembling]

A test

I am going to try posting Awoke to the blog, text and all, in an attempt to get readership up.

If you see a repeat, that is the reason

[cupoftrembling]

Deep in the forest, an eye turns west.

The fifth chapter of Cup of Trembling

[cupoftrembling]

New banner image by @mothkosh

Enjoy a first glimpse at Mariposa

[cupoftrembling]

Mariposa, a paladin, an assassin.

The fourth story in Cup of Trembling

[cupoftrembling]

A singer wields and ebon blade, and a city falls.

The third chapter in Cup of Trembling