#I still need to hunt in the hall of eternity a bit more in case theres more books or furniture there but I assume I got most of it?

[arolesbianism]

Ive been playing the longing and I was planning on staying in the caves and waiting it out even after realizing that escape might be an option but then I walked into the darkness for the first time and. Nevermind I'm getting the shade out no matter how many stupid puzzles that are super obvious but I'm not observant enough to figure out until I've spent far too long wandering through the kingdom with a mushroom trying to figure out where to plant it I'm forced to face

[maraudersftw]

Here’s my little contribution to the Fem!Jily February fest being hosted by the marvelous @thejilyship this month! This one-shot revolves around the fairy tale theme. Enjoy!

First Light

“I can’t believe you brought her here, Prongs.”

“Shh, you’ll wake her.”

“Why don’t we take this outside? Let her rest for a bit.”

“Yes, thank you, Moony. She looks exhausted.”

There was half a beat of silence, and she sensed several sets of stares directed at her unmoving form even through her closed eyelids. She felt strangely exposed, knowing that the owners of the voices—two male, one female—were likely observing her ‘exhaustion’.

“I don’t care if she was dead on her feet! You should’ve been more careful. You see a pretty face and suddenly you’re thinking out of your arse. This is dangerous,” the first voice seethed, sounding thoroughly put out.

“Don’t be ridiculous; she’s just a girl.”

“She’s the princess!” a fourth voice squeaked—male again—and she forced herself to not twitch in alarm. Wherever she was, and she hadn’t a clue as to where, she was still known, still unable to escape her identity.

“Exactly! Wormtail’s right. If a princess is here, soon the entire royal army will follow.”

“So, what do you suggest then?” The female voice again—melodic, strong, annoyed. “I should’ve just left her to die in the middle of the forest? That we drop her back there right this instant?”

Silence fell again, deeper and longer. It seemed no one had an argument to counter the point.

She figured this was not the worst sort of group to have landed herself in. If they were hesitant to throw her to the wolves, they were at least a sight better than her sister. It didn’t matter that the wolves in the latter case had been metaphorical.

“Look, I think she’s waking,” said the fourth voice excitedly, and she realized she’d foolishly let a frown crease her forehead at the thought of Petunia. Even inside her head, her sister caused her trouble.

But there was nothing to it anymore; she pretended to blink her eyes open slowly, a dim glow from lit candles presenting to her a low wooden roof and old walls filled to the crevice with beautiful artwork—plants, ferns, flowers, patterns, and colors of every sort brightening up the space directly across from her.

Her fingers brushed over cool sheets as she sat up, the bed frame whining underneath her in protest. She noticed now that the drawings filled the entire room—save the roof and the floor—and was certain that she’d never seen such talent extracted from the tip of a paintbrush before.

Finally, unable to ignore the curious gazes directed at her any longer, she turned to the occupants in the small room.

There were indeed four of them as she’d guessed—three male and one female. They stood in pairs on either side of the bed. The one with the hardest stare had grey eyes and a mane of silky black hair. He was a handsome creature with a pale face and sharp features. But what really caught her eye was a familiar but rare band of glimmering black that twisted around his right forearm and disappeared under his clothing only to then peek out again over the skin of his neck.

Immediately, she rushed to examine the arms of the others—and sure enough, they each had a band of their own ingrained into their skin.

Her breath hitched in her throat. “You’re shapeshifters.”

If possible, the air in the room became thicker with tension at those words, uttered in the raspy, unused voice. A soft inhale from her left drew her attention to the female, and she blinked slowly, lips parting as she beheld the most entrancing creature she’d ever laid her eyes upon.

Her hair was a mass of dark, unruly strands that fell over her shoulders in thick waves. She knew Petunia would take to the tresses with a brush in hand as soon as she saw them. This meant that Lily inevitably found it wonderful. Large hazel eyes framed by thick lashes blinked at her, her own awe-struck expression mirrored back. The band on her arm was a blazing golden color.

“Your Highness,” said another voice, and she recognized it to belong to the one named ‘Moony’. He was thin—weakly, so—but his face was kind and smile gentle as he bowed his head slightly. Blue twirled around his arm elegantly. “We’re honored to have you here.”

At this, the grey-eyed one snorted in derision.

Blushing, she cleared her throat. “I’m sorry, but who are you? And—where am I?”

“I’m Remus Lupin,” he smiled at her, unbothered by the bitterness of one of his companions. “This is Sirius Black, Peter Pettigrew, and Jamie Potter,” he introduced, pointing to each one in turn.

Her eyes stayed on the last person for a second too long before she turned back to Remus. “It’s good to meet you. I’m Lily Evans.”

A small smile. “We know.”

“And—are you—?”

“Yes.”

“But your kind—we were told you became extinct decades ago!”

“Evidently not,” grumbled Sirius. Then, without preamble, “what are you doing here?”

She bristled at the tone but held the bite in her voice. “Where is here exactly?”

“Just beyond the forests of Gryffindale,” answered Jamie, and Lily was glad to have an excuse to turn to her again. A quick smirk appeared on the woman’s face—the expression so well-suited it was almost alarming—while her elbow swiftly dug into Sirius’s side. “I found you there in the woods. Unconscious.”

A brief scuffle ensued between Potter and Black, but she let her mind wander, dragging up the memories that had been eluding her for the past few minutes. It all came back in vivid clarity: Petunia’s mandate as the Queen of Gryffindale that she be married to Prince Severus. Her vehement refusal. The banishment from the castle for disgracing the family name when she’d confessed that she couldn’t marry a man, any man.

And then the terror that had led her to the forest in the first place—Severus had taken the rejection a little too hard, firmly pressing his belief upon her that she could come to love him if she just tried, and until then his love would be enough for them both, and why wouldn’t she just listen? He’d make her see the truth even if it meant making her stay with him until she ‘came to her senses’.

That was precisely when she’d fled.

Unfortunately, she’d underestimated the dangers that had lurked within the forest—finally coming to understand why humans were forbidden to enter it. She remembered crossing paths with creatures of all sorts: an Acromantula twice her size that had put the pictures she’d seen of the monster to shame, Kappas lurking in small clearings of weed-riddled swamps, and then she’d finally been chased to exhaustion by a pair of Red Caps who’d wanted to beat her to death.

She didn’t remember having collapsed, but if Jamie was to be believed, she was glad to still have breath in her lungs.

“How did you find me?”

Jamie paused in her attempts of trying to pull Sirius into a headlock and turned to her again. Instantly, a practiced grin graced her lips, one hand raising to mess with her hair. “I was strolling around. You seemed like you needed help.”

“Strolling?” she raised her brows, unimpressed, “in the forbidden forest?”

“We do that sometimes,” Peter said, reminding her that there was a fourth person in the room.

Eyes trained on the brown imprinted on his arm, she shook her head. “I can’t believe you’re actually—are there more of you?”

“Not that we’re aware of,” Jamie said. A smirk again, “neither in kind nor in nature.”

“Why do you live here? Hidden beyond the woods?”

“Why shouldn’t we?” Sirius snapped, “our kind is considered ‘unnatural’ in your world. We step out there and we’ll be hunted immediately.”

She looked down, upset. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

“Never mind that,” he waved her off, and she had the feeling that his anger was a fickle thing. “What I’m more interested in is what you’re doing here. And whether that spells danger for us.”

“I—I don’t know,” she sighed truthfully, “I was on the run from—someone, and the forest was the only place they wouldn’t follow me into. I didn’t even know creatures lived on the other side.”

“So…what?” Sirius gaped, “you just ran into that bloody forest knowing that you were probably going to end up dead anyway?”

“I didn’t have time to think at all if I’m being honest.”

The strangest thing happened then. At this careless narration of the most reckless thing she’d ever done in her entire life, Sirius Black grinned at her. Wide and bright and utterly mad. “Brilliant,” he said.

She wanted to roll her eyes, but fear was slowly creeping into her chest and burrowing comfortably again. “You don’t suppose they can cross the forest to come looking for me here, do you?”

A movement to her left. Jamie had moved closer to her side, hazel eyes boring into her with an inscrutable expression. “Not unless they want to die painfully. But the question is, do you want to go back?”

She exhaled, head pounding. Did she want to go back? Well, the answer to that was fairly simple. But she couldn’t see herself moving on with her life on this side of the forest without a care. Everything she’d ever known—everything she ever was—would be lost for all of eternity.

“I need to think.”

“Right, of course,” A nod from Remus. “You must be exhausted. We’ll leave you to rest for a bit.”

“You can freshen up if you want,” said Jamie, and she noticed how the woman’s fingers twitched as if to reach out. “I could lend you something clean to wear.”

Warmth bloomed in her chest, eyes falling to the shredded skirts of her dress, the dark stains. “I would be grateful, thank you.”

They filed out of the room then, Jamie almost knocking into Sirius in her haste to push past him.

She chuckled at the affronted ‘watch it, Prongs!’ and rose from the bed, meandering over to a bathroom across the narrow hall after asking for direction from Remus.

It was small, with little room to move around, but it was clean and smelled faintly of some plant—eucalyptus, perhaps. But it was the art—more of that beautiful, breathtaking art—that made her stare at the walls with her mouth agape. There were four animals that were recurrent throughout: A great black dog, a huge furry wolf, a large stag with antlers that touched the sky, and a nimble rat that she often found hidden in places least expected.

She had a fairly good idea of what—or who—they were meant to represent.

Feeling a little overwhelmed with the reality of her situation, she turned to the modest, round mirror above the sink.

Her thick red hair was matted over her head, limp-looking and crusted with dirt. There were smudges all over her face and a cut marred the skin near her right temple. There was no recollection as to how she’d gotten it. She grimaced at her reflection, hating the dryness of her lips, the sallowness of her skin.

Unbidden, the horrifying knowledge entered her mind that that was how she’d looked the first time Jamie had found her.

She groaned, embarrassed at the direction her thoughts were taking. 

“Now, now, it’s not all that bad, dear.”

A scream was wrenched from her mouth—louder and more surprised than she would’ve expected. But Lily didn’t think she could be blamed. Because—because—had the mirror just tried to console her?!

Before she’d had a chance to gather her bearings or figure out whether she’d hallucinated the voice, there was a thundering sound from outside the bathroom. “Princess Lily?!” a panicked voice: Jamie's. “Are you okay?! I’m coming in!”

But she didn’t have to unlock the door. It was tugged open so effortlessly that she had to wonder whether she had locked it, to begin with. The thought was pushed from her head, however, when frazzled hazel eyes came into view. She noticed—at a rather inopportune moment—that Jamie stood a good few inches taller than her.

“What’s wrong? What happened?” And then light, gentle fingers were upon her person, turning her around, “are you hurt? I heard you scream.”

“I—”

“What an overreaction, young lady,” the mirror said again, and then proceeded to click its tongue, “screaming at another being is not good manners, you know.”

She sucked in a huge breath, wide green eyes swiveling to Jamie again. She reached out and gripped the woman’s arm in a deathly hold. “Did you hear that? Did you hear the mirror talking? Am I losing my mind?”

But she didn’t get an answer. Instead, Jamie’s entire face was swept over with relief, the stiffness of her limbs deflating into casualness under her very fingers. “Oh. The mirror. Bloody hell, you gave me a right scare.”

She couldn’t help her incredulity. “There is…a talking mirror in your bathroom and I gave you a right scare?”

“I would appreciate not being spoken about as if I’m not able to hear every word,” said the mirror disdainfully.

“Not now, Bertha,” Jamie scolded, as if there was ever a good time for such a complaint from an inanimate object—or what was supposed to be inanimate, at least. Lily suddenly found a simple green cotton dress being closed around her fingers. She looked up to find that Jamie’s stare had softened somewhat, an amused smile on her lips. “Here. Freshen up, and I’ll answer your questions honestly.”

She could hardly do anything but nod.

Right before Jamie stepped outside and closed the door behind her, she heard Sirius’s voice bark down the hall. “What the hell was that noise? Did someone die?!”

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

When she returned back to the room, decidedly cleaner and refreshed, Jamie was waiting for her, knee jostling violently with nervous energy. She seemed to have been muttering something under her breath, pulling on her chaotic strands and shaking her head quickly as if to clear it.

She all but sprang up from the bed when her eyes landed on Lily. “Hello.”

“Hello.”

“That dress suits you much better than it ever did me.”

She looked down at the fabric, fingers trailing softly over the cloth. It was a little loose around the shoulders and slightly tighter near the hips, but was more comfortable than anything she’d ever owned. “It’s beautiful. Thank you.”

Jamie shrugged, casually pulling her hair over her left shoulder in an attempt to seem unaffected. But Lily caught the pleased glow that had taken over her face. Hazel met green across the room. “Have you decided if you’re staying?”

“I haven’t,” she replied, “there are things I must know.”

“Then sit, and I will give you all the answers that I can.”

She moved towards the bed, walking around it so that she was closer to where Jamie stood. Behind the woman, a window revealed the first rays of the sun peeking over the forest canopy. She averted her eyes—fear from her recent adventures not erased yet—and found herself looking at a lily in full bloom.

“Who painted these walls?” she asked, “the art is all over the house, as far as I’ve seen.”

Jamie’s dark eyebrows raised, a smirk on her face. “That’s your first question?”

“It’s one I’m most curious about.”

“Do you like them?”

It was the opposite of an answer, but she hummed, stepping closer to the woman so that she’d see the sincerity in her eyes. “They’re the second most magnificent thing I’ve seen in my life.”

A sharp intake of breath. “What’s the first?”

“I was promised the truth,” she replied, feeling strangely clever as she sat down on the bed, heart fluttering madly, “I don’t remember offering any in return.”

Jamie grinned, quick and impressed. “Fair enough. What do you want to know?”

“I think I’ll start with the most obvious—why do you have a magic mirror in your house?”

“That mirror is not the only thing that’s magical here.”

She felt her mouth go dry. “But—but that’s impossible. Magic was wiped out centuries ago. It couldn’t possibly—”

“Couldn’t it?” Jamie interrupted, excitement buzzing around her very being. “You know what we are. You saw that mirror. Do you really still believe everything in the world is what you’ve been taught, princess?”

“Just call me Lily,” she said quickly, and Jamie smiled, “but then how does no one else know? Why is everyone on the other side of the forbidden forest ignorant to such breathtaking possibilities?”

“Not everyone,” Jamie answered slowly, lowering herself onto the bed so that she was facing Lily properly. Her eyes were depths of molten gold and held the promise of everything beautiful in the world. “There are some on the other side who—who know about us, whom we’ve placed our trust in. We get our news about Gryffindale, about the royal family, from them. It’s how we recognized you. Magic has existed in your world always, Lily, and will continue to do so even if it remains hidden behind closed doors.”

“Have you—did you ever live there? Before?”

“Yes. As did Sirius. He’s my brother, in all the ways that matter. After my parents passed, we decided it wouldn’t do to hide our identities anymore. These marks on our bodies—we didn’t want to be ashamed of them anymore.”

Almost instinctively, Lily’s fingers reached out to trace over the glowing print on her arm. Jamie tensed underneath the gentle touch but did not make to pull away. She looked up and found a whirlwind of emotions blazing in her eyes. “And so you escaped.”

“And so we escaped,” Jamie confirmed, voice barely more than a whisper.

“That was very brave of you.”

“I suppose you can understand the feeling—pretending to be someone you’re not—and how it can slowly kill you.”

Lily nodded, tearing her gaze away when the intensity of her words, her eyes, grew too much. Her forefinger continued to trail down the band until faded into the skin of Jamie’s palm. Something caught her notice, and Lily smiled, eyes flashing up again. “It’s you.”

“Pardon?” Jamie’s pulse skittered erratically against her touch.

“You’re the one who made these paintings,” she clarified, smile widening. A drag of her hand, until she could tap meaningfully on Jamie’s fingertips. “There are smudges of fading colors and dried paint all over your fingers and nails.”

“Oh that,” a mumbled response, and she was surprised to see the flush that had stolen over Jamie’s cheeks. For someone who exuded so much confidence and smugness with every toss of the hair, the sudden modesty was exhilarating to watch. “Well. Yes. I just make them when I’m bored.”

“If this is the result of your boredom, I’d like to see you actually try, Prongs.”

She looked pleased at that, shifting slightly closer so that her knee bumped against Lily’s. “Caught that, did you?”

“It suits you,” she nodded, trying to count the number of shades in hazel, “being a stag, I mean.”

“Well, you did say I was magnificent.”

It was her turn to flush; heat shooting up her face in a heartbeat. “I never actually said—”

“Lily,” Jamie interrupted, and the way her name sounded in that moment—gentle, caring, precious, revered—was enough to make the protests die down in her throat. Jamie shifted her hand so that she could slowly interlace their fingers together. She looked up, eyes beautiful and bright and entirely too hopeful. “Will you stay?”

Lily looked down into her lap when she felt tingling warmth run through her veins. Her breath got lost somewhere inside her when she noticed the pattern of delicate vines blooming on her skin from the places Jamie’s fingertips touched her hand. They were ephemeral—greens and blues of buds and stems dissolving into the paleness quickly—but glorious. And she knew, in that moment—she knew she could spend all her life watching Jamie cast more magic over her.

“I will stay.”

[winchester-fantasies]

Everything

Read Part One Here: Mean Something

Summary: Your heart is still smarting after your heartbreaking sexual encounter with Sam. You know it didn’t mean anything but will Sam convince you otherwise?

Word Count: 3171

Warnings: smut, angst, fluff, some swearing

Pairing: Sam x Reader

A/N: Here’s the second part to “Mean Something,” as promised! Hope you enjoy it!! ❤❤

Winchester Fantasies’ Masterlist

     You picked at the cuticles around your fingers as you looked on at the scene before you. Clamoring voices echoed throughout the war room as the crowd of people continued to grow. You stood a few feet away from them, leaning against the map table.

     Dean had just gotten back. You weren’t sure how. But from the few murmurings around you, the general consensus was Michael had just…left. You didn’t think that was a good sign, but everyone was happy he was back so you wouldn’t put a damper on anything. Not now.

     Your focus came back on reality as the crowd began to part. You looked up just as Dean himself left the group and walked up to you. He smirked and held his arms open to you. You rolled your eyes but smiled as you pushed yourself off the table and went to him.

     He wrapped you in his arms, and you hugged him back tight. He was as much a brother to you as a friend, and you were glad he was finally home.

     “Thanks for taking care of Sammy while I was gone,” Dean murmured, placing a chaste kiss against your temple before stepping back. You forced a smile and nodded. You glanced back at the group only to meet Sam’s eyes. He was watching you, much like he had the day he’d asked you to go to the pantry. As if he was trying to gauge your reaction to something.

     He sent you a smirk, and you gave him a small smile in return. You were happy for him. He finally had his brother back. But a part of you still felt slighted that he’d used your body as a distraction from the pain of losing Dean. You’d really hoped it meant something when he came and found you, desperately pleading he needed you. A part of you still wanted to believe it did. But he’d made it abundantly clear it was a one-time deal. A quick fuck to get his mind off of Dean and Michael and being the leader of the group from the apocalyptic world. It hurt even more, realizing somewhere along the way you’d completely lost your heart to him.

     You walked away, into the library, as everyone began to disperse. You had an upcoming solo hunt. You weren’t completely confident you knew what you were dealing with so you needed to hone up on some of the lore.

     You grabbed the book you needed from the shelf and headed for the file room. Just as you reached the library entrance Sam walked through, a soft smile of acknowledgement on his lips. You pretended you didn’t see, instead brushing past him and hurrying to your destination.

     You sighed once you reached the file room. The silence was deafening, but it’s what you needed. The constant busyness of people was beginning to wear on you, causing you to seek out solitude more and more these days. Or at least that’s what you told yourself. A small part of you said it was because you were trying to avoid Sam.

     You became engrossed in your research, and the further you read, the more you were convinced what you were dealing with was a skinwalker. Your stomach growled, and you glanced at your watch: 9:00 p.m. You leaned your head side-to-side, cracking your neck before leaning back and stretching your arms. 

     You were about to get up when Dean sauntered in. He chuckled when you yawned and rubbed your eyes. “How’s it going?” he asked, settling himself on the edge of the table.

     You nodded. “Going okay,” you said. “Just researching a bit before I go on my solo hunt. I think it’s a skinwalker.”

     “Hm,” Dean commented, absentmindedly. He was silent for a moment, staring at the ground.

     “Is…everything alright?” you asked, smiling uncertainly.

     Dean gave you a distracted smile. “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “It’s just…what’s going on with you and Sam?”

     You blanched and swallowed hard. “Wh…what do you mean?” you asked, your voice coming out as a nervous whisper.

     “C’mon, (Y/N),” Dean said, rolling his eyes. “I’ve barely been back a day, and I can already cut the tension between you two with a knife.”

     “Oh,” you said, not really sure what else to say.

     Dean studied your face carefully, a slight frown on his brow. “Did something happen?”

     You looked down quickly, a blush creeping up your neck and to your face. 

     “Hey,” Dean said, placing his hand on top of yours. “You know you can tell me anything, right?”

**********

     Sam walked into the map room, scanning the crowd carefully before turning around. He walked through the library, pausing for a moment to look around and glance in the alcoves before making his way to the kitchen.

     “Hey, Maggie,” Sam greeted the young woman sitting at the kitchen table, a cup of coffee in hand and a lore book open in front of her.

     She glanced up, hazel eyes sparkling. “Hey, Sam!” 

     He smiled slightly. “Have you seen (Y/N)?”

     She frowned. “I think she went to the file room a while ago. I know she’s been having some trouble figuring out what she’s going up against.”

     “What do you mean ‘what she’s going up against’?” Sam asked in confusion. 

     “Her solo hunt,” Maggie said as if Sam should know exactly what she was talking about.

     “What solo hunt?” Sam asked, his voice a deep growl.

     “You didn’t know she was going by herself?” Maggie asked with a quick shake of her head. “I thought you assigned it to her. You’ve been doling out cases to everyone.”

     Sam took a deep breath to still the rage brewing in his chest. “No, I didn’t know she was going on a hunt by herself,” Sam clipped. “And I certainly wouldn’t have sent her to work it alone.”

     Maggie’s eyes went wide and filled with trepidation. “D…do you want me to call her?” she asked, fumbling for the phone in her pocket.

     “No, I’ll find her myself,” Sam said curtly. He forced a smile. “Thanks for your help, Maggie.”

     He walked out of the kitchen without another word, passing the group of people vying for his attention and ignoring their demands for direction. He stalked down the hallway, his head clouding with anger and his fists clenched at his sides. He didn’t understand why she would go on a solo case without informing him first. He’d been very implicit about everyone checking with him before embarking on one themselves - regardless of who they were or what rank they held.

     He noticed the file room door was open as he approached, light flooding out into the hall. He was about to walk in and confront her when he heard voices. He stopped, pressing himself against the wall, his ear angled so he could hear better who she was talking to and what they were discussing.

     “Is…is everything okay?” she asked, her voice filled with concern.

     “Yeah, yeah,” Dean’s voice floated out the door. There was a pause, and Sam waited expectantly for his brother to continue, half expecting him to walk out the door at any moment. He felt a pang of guilt for eavesdropping, but his curiosity was too great to ignore.

     “It’s just…what’s going on with you and Sam?” Dean asked gruffly. Sam tensed, her response seeming an eternity to come. His shoulders slumped in relief when she finally spoke again.

     “Wh…what do you mean?” she stuttered, her voice a strained whisper.

     “C’mon, (Y/N),” Dean said, obviously fed up. “I’ve barely been back a day, and I can already cut the tension between you two with a knife.”

     “Oh,” she murmured, her voice small and uncertain.

     “Did something happen?” Dean asked protectively.

     There was another pause, and Sam held his breath. He dared a glance around the corner, his heart pounding in his chest. She was sitting at the table, one hand on the book open in front of her, the other toying with a string unravelling at the hem of her shirt. Her face was flushed as she stared down at her lap.

     Dean was leaning against the table, his back to the door. One leg casually hung off the side, the other was placed on the floor, steadying himself. 

     “Hey,” Dean said softly. Sam’s blood boiled as Dean reached over, placing his hand softly on top of hers. “You know you can tell me anything, right?”

     She glanced up, and Sam retreated a bit so she wouldn’t see him, but not enough that he couldn’t see her. Her eyes were filled with a mixture of apprehension and dejection as she stared up at his brother.

     “Um, I…we…” she said, licking her lips and looking down quickly. “We…we…had sex,” she whispered.

     Before Dean was able to reply, Sam stomped into the room, chest heaving. She glanced up, her eyes widening at his sudden entrance. Dean turned, eyeing his brother up and down.

     “Hey, Sam,” she said nervously. “What’s up?”

     “I could ask you the same thing,” Sam grunted, eyes shooting daggers at her.

     She blanched and shrunk back into the chair, quickly removing her hand from Dean’s as if just realizing it was still clasped around her own. “How…how much did you hear?”

     “Enough to know you go around blabbering things that should be kept between you and me!” Sam accused.

     “Dude,” Dean finally interjected, getting up from the table and standing by her chair defensively. “If you really did hear as much as you say you did, then you know she didn’t ‘blabber’ anything to me. I was the one who asked her.”

     Sam frowned and ticked his jaw as he considered Dean’s argument. He knew his brother was right, but he was still angry, and he couldn’t let it go. “Still,” Sam clipped. “She shouldn’t be talking about our sex life,” he scoffed.

     Before Dean could get in another word, she had pushed back from the table, the legs of her chair scraping across the concrete floor with an ear-splitting screech. Her eyes were blazing as she faced Sam, her hands fisted at her sides. “Our sex life?” she asked through gritted teeth. “It was a one-time thing.”

     Sam clenched his jaw, her words pricking his heart more than he cared to admit. “It was intimate,” he ground out, barely keeping his rage at bay.

     She huffed out a harsh laugh. “Intimate?” she spat. “You call a quick fuck - a ‘distraction’ - intimate?”

      Sam stared at her in shock, words escaping him. She shook her head, tears welling in her eyes. “I really thought it meant something, Sam,” she said, voice quivering. Without another word she rushed out the door.

     Sam stared after her, his heart seizing up. He wanted to call after her. Run after her. Hold her. Kiss her…. Tell her he was sorry. But he didn’t. 

     He glanced up to find Dean looking at him, his face hard. “You really fucked up, man,” Dean admonished. “You better have one hell of apology planned, otherwise I’d say you just lost the best woman on the planet,” Dean said before walking away and leaving Sam feeling bewildered, self-loathing quickly replacing his anger.

**********

     You walked briskly down the hallway, tears blurring your vision and causing you to almost trip. You ducked into the bathroom just as Mary turned down the hallway. You didn’t want to have to explain your tears. 

     You leaned against the door, trying to compose yourself. It didn’t matter what you did. Your heart was still shattered. 

     You looked at the shower and started stripping. You didn’t want to go back to your room. If someone needed you that’s the first place they’d look, and you didn’t want to be found. You just wanted to be alone.

     You turned on the water, letting it run a bit to heat up first before stepping under the warm rivulets. Tears mingled with water, and you couldn’t hold back a sob as you leaned your head back, letting the water cascade down your hair and back.

     You gasped, and your eyes shot open when you felt fingers ghosting your waist. Sam stood in front of you. You jumped back as if you’d been burned, but you could feel yourself slipping on the wet tile as you stepped away. 

     In one swift movement Sam had hooked his arms around your waist, hauling you forward into his bare chest before you could fall. You clung to him for a moment to compose yourself, but then you shoved him off you. “What are you doing here?” you demanded angrily.

     “I wanted to check on you,” Sam said sincerely. “Make sure you were okay.”

     He reached out for you again, but you quickly backed away. “Well, you checked,” you said brusquely. “Now you can go,” you said, motioning to the door.

     You turned back towards the water, waiting for Sam to leave so you could finish up and curl up in your bed. Instead you felt him come up behind you. He placed his hands on your hips, holding you in place.

     Your breathing picked up, willing away the arousal his close proximity was creating. He leaned down, his lips grazing your ear. “You don’t think it meant anything,” Sam murmured. His lips made contact with your neck and against your better judgement, you leaned your head to the side as his mouth travelled down to the juncture of your neck and shoulder. You moaned as he sucked a mark into the sensitive skin.

     He gently spun you around to face him, his hands never leaving your body. His eyes were dark with desire as he stared down at you. He studied your face carefully as if trying to memorize every detail. He raised his hand to your face, his thumb caressing your chin and the side of your jaw before his eyes darted to your lips and meeting your gaze once more. 

     “But it did mean something,” Sam said, his voice a throaty whisper. “It meant everything.”

     With that he crashed his lips to yours in a needy kiss. He back you up until you were pressed against the cool tile of the shower, his body pressed firmly against yours. You could feel his hardening member as he continued to kiss you, his tongue licking your bottom lip. You granted him access as you wrapped your arms around his neck. His grip on you tightened, his arms fully wrapping around you, his hands settling on your ass. 

     You both pulled back for oxygen, your chests heaving. Sam leaned forward, trailing a line of kisses down your neck. You gasped as his fingers unexpectedly found your clit, rubbing lazy circles over the bundle of nerves. You subconsciously spread your legs further, and you bit your lower lip and closed your eyes, leaning your head back. 

     Sam abruptly stopped, and your eyes shot open to look at him questioningly. His eyes were earnest as he matched your gaze. “If you don’t want this to go any further, tell me now,” Sam said breathlessly. 

     You smirked coyly, leaning forwards and standing on your tiptoes, your lips coming to his ear. “I want you, Sam. All of you,” you purred, nipping at his earlobe. 

     You felt his muscles contract as he shuddered. He pushed you back against the wall again, kissing you hard. His hands fell to your lower thighs before picking you up. You wrapped your arms around his broad shoulders to steady yourself before carefully moving your hand between your bodies and lining him up with you.

     A groan fell from his mouth, a moan from your own as he slowly entered. He laid his forehead against your shoulder once he was fully sheathed within you. After a few moments he began moving. You expected the same brutal and hurried thrusts from the first time. But with each languid rock of his hips you realized this wasn’t a quickie. It couldn’t even be considered fucking…. He was making love to you.

     You moaned at that realization and arched your back into him, your bare breasts pressed into his firm chest. He took the opportunity to scatter your chest with open-mouthed kisses before making his way up, nipping and sucking at your collarbone and neck before finally settling on your kiss-swollen lips.

     Sam shifted you slightly in his arms, giving him a new angle and allowing him to thrust deeper. You threw your head back with a wanton moan as he hit your sweet spot. “S…Sam,” you mewled. 

     Sam smiled gently, his thumb caressing the skin where his hands were still hooked under your thighs. “I know, baby, I know,” Sam gruffly reassured, his voice strained as he struggled to speak past the pleasure. “Just let go. I’ve got you.” He leaned forward, burying his face into the crook of your neck. “I’m never letting you go,” he whispered.

     You came then, your walls clenching around him so tight he cried out. His hips began stuttering as he helped you ride out your orgasm. He came then, too, spilling his seed deep inside you, your walls still fluttering with aftershocks.

     He gingerly pulled out before retrieving a washcloth and cleaning you up carefully. He turned off the now cold water before wrapping a towel around you and carrying you to his room. 

     He laid you on the bed and settled down next to you, pulling you into his arms. He smiled, brushing a few damp strands of hair off your brow. “I’m so sorry,” Sam said, his voice a hoarse whisper.

     “I know,” you murmured, giving him a small smile as you caressed his cheek.

     “When I came to you in the pantry, I was deranged with stress and exhaustion and grieving for my brother,” Sam said, a pained look on his face. “All I knew was that I needed you.”

     You watched him silently, waiting for him to continue. His eyes fell and he pulled you tighter into him as if afraid you might disappear if he didn’t. “But then…afterwards,” Sam said, sounding almost ashamed. “I realized just how much I needed you. How much more I cared for you beyond friendship. And I was scared, (Y/N).”

     He looked at you, his eyes swimming with guilt and pain. “I had already lost Dean, and I couldn’t lose you, too. So I acted like it didn’t mean anything.”

     You smiled, running your fingers through his shaggy hair. He leaned forward, peppering your face with soft kisses. 

     When he pulled back, his eyes held something you’d never seen before. It was something that was deep and ardent, and you knew you wanted him to look at you that way for the rest of your lives. 

     “You mean everything to me,” Sam said gently. His lips turned up into a soft grin as if just realizing something for the first time. “You are my everything.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed it, let me know!! ❤

***Please do not share my content on any other platform without my consent.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Everything Tags:

@divadinag @mogaruke @calaofnoldor @defenderrosetyler @coffeebooksandfandom

[etherealfleurbisou]

❧𝐵𝓇𝑜𝑜𝓂 𝒞𝓁𝑜𝓈𝑒𝓉

Pairing: Draco Malfoy x Ravenclaw Reader

Warnings: a bit of house stereotyping

Word Count: 1,769

a/n: feedback and critique is encouraged! enjoy !

Where is it?

    You could’ve sworn you saw ‘Hogwarts: A History’ tucked away on one of these shelves earlier today. You skimmed over the shelf once more before hopelessly giving up and moving towards another wooden section- the only light source coming from a small candle you brought with you, which hardly did it’s job of illuminating the awfully dark library.

    Maybe one of the other students had just misplaced it, you thought to yourself as you made your way to the Divination section. It wasn’t rare that students often forget to put things back where they found them- meaning it wasn’t rare you had to go on an entire scavenger hunt to find what you were looking for in a library that should be in alphabetical order.

    You had left your house commons after hours to go to the library to find a book you had forgotten to fetch earlier in the day. It may not seem like much, but have being placed in Ravenclaw, you felt the need to keep up your A Game when it comes to studying. After all, the more you study the better your grades will be- at least that’s what your best friend Cho Chang feels the need to tell you and the others every time you sit down and break out a study session.

    After what felt like hours of pacing through the library and risking points from Ravenclaw you decided it was best to just give up and head back to your quarters. With one last huff of annoyance, you sling your bag over your shoulder and make your way out of the library and into the long stretch of the school’s corridors. 

    I could have sworn I saw that book just today, you thought to yourself. You tried retracing your steps- besides, there weren’t many people taking that history course to begin with- so who could’ve taken it?

    You gnawed the skin on the inside of your cheek while you walked, eyes falling to the floor as you attempted to conjure up a plan to figure out exactly how you would complete this essay without the necessary materials. Of course you could always ask one of your fellow housemates to help you out, but what would they think of that? A Ravenclaw, failing to complete an assignment as soon as it was received? 

    The day the sorting hat announced your house, you were quite taken aback.  You never truly saw yourself as a Ravenclaw- after all, you knew you had qualities that could have placed you into either of the four houses but yet it still had caught you off guard. Of course you could have refused the placement, but you couldn’t help but assume it was… meant to be. Maybe you weren’t the best at staying completely organised and you weren’t necessarily the biggest fan of class- especially compared to some of your other classmates- yet you took it as a challenge. This can be good for me, you had thought. Unfortunately, this led you six years down the road, barely making it out with the grades you have now. If it wasn’t for Cho and the others, you didn’t really think you would have made it this far. 

    You were so enveloped in your thoughts you hadn’t even noticed the other steps coming down the hall until it was too late- your body clashing into a slightly taller, slim frame, nearly knocking you down.

    “Woah-” a hand grabbed your arm, steadying you, but instantly pulled away once you were balanced. The person in front of you cleared their throat and straightened their posture before speaking, “You might want to watch where you’re going next time. All this space and you still manage to walk in my way.” He spat his words as his face contorted in disgust- as if you were filth.

    “I could say the same to you,” you retorted, your face turning slightly upwards to look him in the eyes. “With all this space I don’t really see the need to be walking directly in front of someone going opposite of you.” You fold your arms and happen to glance down at what he was holding; an aged book quite familiar to you sat snug in his grasp. “Hey-” Your brows furrow as you attempt to seize the well bound pages from his keeping yet he moves quicker, managing to snatch it out from your grip. You sigh, frustrated.

    “I have been looking for that book all night! Where did you find that?” You go to reach for it once more but he holds it farther from your reach..

    “I checked it out earlier today.” He replies plainly. You attempt to snatch it, resulting in the pale boy who stood before you to extend his arm fully towards the ceiling to ensure you couldn’t grab for it- but that didn’t necessarily stop you from trying. You stood on your tiptoes in attempts to confiscate it but he only held it higher.

    “Give it, Malfoy!” You seethed. He had to have been going to return it to the library anyway, so why not just give it to you now?

    “What’s in it for me?” You stopped, your eyes squinting in confusion.

    “In it for you? Nothing’s ‘in it’ for you. I need that book for an essay, just hand it over!” You tried once more to snag the book, but it was no use- force just wasn’t cutting it. You sighed in defeat and he smirked down at you. You look down and sigh once more before meeting your eyes to his.

    “Draco, come on, please? I have this awful essay due to Professor Binns tomorrow, and I haven’t even started it yet I need that book, can you please-”

    “Shh shut up!” Draco’s attention has shifted to something else now, his demands cutting you off mid sentence, resulting in you returning to your angered state.

    “The nerve you must have Malfoy, I-”

    “Shh!” a finger places itself over your lips and you hush once more, staying silent this time in efforts to figure out exactly what he was on about. His brows knit themselves together as his eyes wander over his shoulder, and you look to meet his gaze. A shadow was limping down the hall, nearing the turn of the corridor where you and Draco stood. 

    Filch.

    Your widened eyes met Draco’s as he pulls you into the broom closet that stood to your left and shut the door, clamping his cold, pale hand over your mouth. You both stood there quietly, the echoes of Filch’s clunky boots bouncing off the handsome walls of the school’s corridor . 

    You couldn’t help but notice how incredibly cramped the dirty broom closet was where you both stood. To your right lay three old, dusty brooms along the wall and a small wooden stool with an aged rag draped over atop of it. The ceiling seemed to lean downwards towards your right side, making the space seem even more compact. To be honest, you were surprised the two of you could even squeeze inside in the first place. 

    Your eyes slowly trailed up to Draco’s face, and you couldn’t help but stare. His masculine features happened to be even more attractive up close compared to all those times you’ve glanced over at him from across the room during lunch or in class. You shift your gaze to his eyes, examining the intricate designs within his steel blue irises; almost surprised you had never noticed them before. 

    Warmth crept beneath your cheeks as you are met with the undeniable realization: you were attracted to the Slytherin boy before you who stood with his hand still secured over your mouth, waiting for the old caretaker to pass by so the two of you could get out of the tight space.

    Filch’s steps had come and gone, leaving both you and Draco alone and both of your bodies practically smushed up against one another. He clears his throat as he drops his hand to his side, his cool eyes flickering to your lips before moving up to meet your gaze. You shift slightly and gulp before breaking the silence.

    “Erm, I think the coast is clear.” Your voice couldn’t have been more than a whisper. He blinks a couple times before breaking eye contact and opening the door to the closet that had enclosed you both for what felt like an eternity. 

    Draco peered out from behind the wooden door before stepping out fully, you following close behind him as if to use him as a human shield in case Filch were to come back down your hall. He turns to face you now, studying your state before speaking.

    “Well that was…”

    “Scary,” you finished his sentence, earning a chuckle from his winsome lips. You let out a sigh of relief, your smile slightly fading as your  focus lands on the history book still tucked in Draco’s grip. He notices this and hands it to you with a small, awkward smile. 

    “You probably need this more than I do.” 

    You take the bounded pages from his hand and into your own, the brown leathered cover warm to the touch from the heat of his own person, you presume. 

    “Thank you, Malfoy,” your words a bit playful now as they exit your lips. He gives you a small nod before speaking once more.

     “Hey, maybe we could share a book next time,” his words mimic your own in their lively manner, but his aura then changed, giving off a more serious manner. “Like… study together?” His hand reached to the back of his neck as he awaited your response, which was a small smile and a nod. “I’d love to, Draco.”

    He smiled now, a sight you weren’t exactly used to- but that didn’t mean you were opposed to it; it was… contagious.

    “It’s a date.”

    You blushed at his words and nodded once more. He extended his arm out in front of you as if to gesture ‘after you’ and you obliged, allowing the platinum-haired boy to escort you back to your quarters. 

[cotillion-the-rope]

Not Hollow Chapter Three: Missing

Having written and shared the thought that been circling through their head for so long now, Hollow actually felt a bit better. It was still their fault their chained sibling was in that situation. But now Hornet knew of the chain’s sibling’s eventual fate too. Hopefully she could do something about it because something needed to be done, their sibling deserved better.

Hornet didn’t seem to know what to do though. She paced back and forth between the kitchen and living room, occasionally mumbling to herself. Hollow had never seen her so openly distressed before. … They should do something to help, offer a possible to solution like she’d asked them to after they’d shared the thought. … They didn’t have an idea though but they knew someone who might. They desperately wanted to see him again anyway even if he probably didn’t want to see them because of their failure. This would be a good excuse though, right?

They went back to their room to grab their quill and another sheet of paper. ‘We could ask Father for help.’ they wrote before heading back out. They intercepted Hornet’s pacing and handed her the paper.

She sighed as she looked back up at them. “He’s dead.”

Oh… that was… news. How could the Pale King be dead though? He was supposed to be a god, wasn’t he? He’d always seemed so strong, perfect, and… invulnerable.

“And even if he wasn’t,” Hornet continued oblivious to Hollow’s reeling, “his last plan resulted in you suffering and now Ghost suffering on top off our countless siblings dead in the Abyss, so I wouldn’t want any more ideas from him anyway,” Her voice was full of venom as if… she hated the Pale King. He was her father too though so how was that possible? “We need to figure something else out. Something that doesn’t result in more death and suffering.”

With a sigh, she resumed pacing.  “Another way to contain the Radiance in a not living being or make bugs immune to the Infection or I don’t know killing her sounds nice. …  Hmm… is it possible to kill her? It has to be, right? … She’s in the Dream Realm though which we can’t access. … Ghost could though… I’m not sure how but they definitely could. Meaning if they’d done things differently, they probably could’ve killed her. But they didn’t so… we might have to?”

Did ‘Ghost’ refer to the chained sibling? The context certainly made it seem like that was the case. Which meant Hornet had given them a name, she really was the best sister.

Hornet suddenly snapped around to face Hollow again.  “You and them are the same though. So can you access the Dream Realm too?”

Hollow shook their head. But that was a good idea; access the Dream Realm and kill the Radiance. Assuming they were strong enough to do so anyway. Hollow certainly couldn’t but… maybe Hornet could?

“Well, it was an idea. … Oh but what about…” She looked up and around, seemingly looking for something. “Where’s Grimmchild?”

Hollow looked around too and yep, Grimmchild was nowhere to be seen. He’d evidently disappeared sometime during their mostly one-sided conversation. Odd, he didn’t normally do that.

***

Grimmchild still didn’t know the full story because no one ever told him anything. But he’d picked up enough to know that the Summoner was in distress. He’d suspected as such because of their continued absence but Hornet seemed so calm and he’d chosen to trust her but apparently she’d been lying to herself as well as him. Grimmchild wasn’t going to stand for it any longer, he was going to find the Summoner and save them.

So, while Hornet was pacing and mumbling to herself, he teleported out and headed for the void egg; where else would the Summoner be? They’d gone in and had never come out. His sense of direction wasn’t great without the charm to guide him but it was near enough to the surface that it didn’t take long to find upon heading down the well.

The power emanating off it was scary. Which was why he’d hesitated to go in last time, resulting in meeting Hollow who’d distracted him long enough for Hornet to take him away. Not this time though. He couldn’t teleport in so he landed in front of it. Luckily the door’s fit wasn’t perfect, making it possible to grab the edge with his teeth and pull it open, bracing himself with his wings. Once it was open enough all he had to do was go around and push some more and he was in.

It was pitch black inside except for the strange light symbols on the walls immediately next to him and floor where he rested. The latter disappeared when he took flight, the former moved with him as he started down the hall.

The Egg was draining him. Not good but not immediately dangerous enough for him to care. He’d be out of here before it became a problem, hopefully with the Summoner at his side once more. … He’d have to be fast though, he wasn’t anywhere near his full strength yet.

Eventually the hallway reached an end, opening up into a large room. Chains descended from unseen ceiling, anchoring to the floor and wrapping around the Summoner suspended in the middle. Their nail lay discarded on the floor beneath them as they hung there unmoving.

Grimmchild rushed to them, mewling and hissing in anger. How dare anyone do this to them? He was going to burn alive whoever did it. First, he was going to rescue the Summoner though.

***

How was Ghost supposed to keep their mind empty when Grimmchild was freaking out right in front of them and spitting fire at their chains? And when that didn’t work, he bit, chewed, tugged at them with all his might before going back to spitting more fire. Relentlessly stubborn as he was in all things.

The Radiance pushed at Ghost’s mind, a bright burning light. They mustn’t let her break them, they mustn’t think. … … … Grimmchild was so determined to save them and upset at the chains that held them. He wasn’t ever supposed to see Ghost like this. He wasn’t supposed to ever…

Searing pain ripped through Ghost’s mask as it cracked. Burning, blinding light filled their mind as the Radiance let out a triumphant roar.

***

Grimmchild flinched back at the sound of something cracking that wasn’t metal. It was the Summoner’s mask. Not a big deal. They broke sometimes and came back. So this was good actually, it should free them from the chains.

Except instead of their shell disintegrating as their shade broke free, their eyes filled with the bad orange light. A roar came from them too, not theirs – they didn’t even have a voice – but one Grimmchild recognized anyway; the Radiance. He’d known her in one of his past lives. … And that’s all he remembered for now; that he’d known her in some way.

She was bad though because the orange light was bad. And she was in the Summoner’s mind. She’d hurt them and… now had them? The orange light meant mindless husks and danger. More than ever Grimmchild needed to save the Summoner from the Radiance and their imprisonment. With a hiss, half of anger half of fear, he renewed his efforts to break the chains.

***

The Radiance’s roar filled the empty space of the Dream Realm, cutting into Hollow’s thoughts about where Grimmchild might’ve disappeared to. They more felt than heard it, making them flinch instinctively. It was supposed to hurt and be so much louder and more intense but… she wasn’t in their mind anymore. So this meant… the chained sibling had cracked!

It was all Hollow’s fault. They were supposed to be pure; they were supposed to contain her for eternity. But they’d failed. It was their sole reason to exist and they’d failed. They deserved to be…

“Are you all right?” Hornet asked, stepping closer, giving them a worried look.

They shook their head again; no they were far from all right. They turned went back into their room for the quill to write more on the paper they’d written their previous message on.

‘The chained sibling, Ghost (?), cracked!’

Hornet was in the doorway to their room when they turned back around so they handed it to her here.

She gasped as she read it. “How do you know?” She handed the paper back for them to answer.

‘Felt it.’ Just like how the chained sibling had felt when Hollow had cracked and came from who even knew how far away to help them. Which meant Hollow owed them, right? But they couldn’t take on the Radiance again, the mere thought made them want to just die instead. But also, they were already cracked so it wouldn’t work anyway. But still… ‘We have to help.’

“Yeah, I know. That’s what were just talking about.” And neither of them had plausible ideas. “Ugh… I’m going go check. You wait here, I’ll be back in a bit.” She turned around fast enough to make her dress twirl before striding out.

***

With Grimmchild nowhere to be found, Hornet had to run off to the Black Egg temple without him because she didn’t have time to hunt him down. If he wanted to find her he could teleport to his charm still pinned to her dress.

When she got into the Temple the Infection pustules were starting to fill back up with orange light, not much yet but still definitely there. Meaning that Ghost had indeed cracked, proving beyond any shadow of a doubt that they weren’t hollow either. Dammit!

What was even the point then? Hornet and all of Hallownest were in the exact same situation they’d been in before just with a different failed vessel in the Egg. … Except the door was unsealed and even open a little – meaning someone had gone in possibly recently. Hornet could go in if she wanted to. It’d be dangerous for her to stay inside for any significant length of time but a little while wouldn’t be too bad.

What reason would she have to go in though? … Curiosity; she’d been in charge of guarding Hallownest for a long time now and the Black Egg was at the heart of its stasis and the reason for her watch so she had a right to be curious about it. Also, she could possibly investigate why the door was open, perhaps it had something to do with Ghost’s cracking.

So, having justified it to herself, she approached the door and pulled it open enough to allow her to step in. Unsurprisingly it was dark except for the glowing runes on the floor and walls that followed her as she moved further in. It wasn’t long before she could hear something further ahead… Grimmchild? It certainly sounded a lot like him. She picked up her pace.

It was Grimmchild. He was spitting fireballs at one of the chains descending from the ceiling. … But wrapped up in those chains was Ghost, their mask cracked, their eyes filled with bright orange light.

Hornet drew her needle in one swift motion, ready to attack… what? There was nothing to attack. The Radiance was in Ghost’s mind, there was nothing she could do. She could probably break the chains and free Ghost physically but then what? They were Infected, the Radiance at least partially controlled them, making them dangerous. So… what was she supposed to do?

After several long seconds of being frozen, tense and ready for action that wasn’t coming, her attention was drawn back to Grimmchild as he suddenly went limp in the air. She dropped her needle to leap forward catch him before he hit the ground. He hung limp in her arms, unconscious; he’d been in the Egg too long. … He was the reason Ghost had cracked, wasn’t he? Because how was Ghost supposed to not think when Grimmchild was freaking out right in front of them?

Hornet was going have to yell at him about that later though. First, she had to get him out of here and to a place he could recover. “I’ll be back Ghost,” she said as she cradled Grimmchild to her shoulder with one arm and yanked the thread attached to her needle to pull it back to herself. “I promise.” She’d sat idly by and let the Radiance and the Pale King have their way with Hallownest and her siblings for too long now, she wasn’t going to stand for it anymore. She was going to fix this no matter what it took.

[insane-control-room]

Make a Claim

A collaborative work with the wonderful, incredible, lovely, @randomwriteronline (ilysm <<<333)

ao3 link here

inspired by her fic The Thought 

After a grave mistake, the doctor finally asks him, plain as day, to make their claim their own.

“I am at my wits end, Bandit!” Doc Carver muttered in a loss as he repaired the foolhardy puppet’s strings. “I have tried everything - letters, poems, offers to help him, repair him, even repainting his chipped coat! I cannot understand how a man can be so, so oblivious!”

Bandit did not say anything, merely sighing. He was used to the Doctor’s spiel at this point.

“And to add insult to injury...! After I repainted him, he hugged me, and I felt so overjoyed, but…” a noise of frustration broke out of the taller puppet’s mouth piece. “It was too short lived! And then he ran off, and I, like a coward, was too dumbfounded and startled to even try and go after him, so I didn’t follow. Ugh, that was just simply pathetic, wasn’t it, Bandit?”

“Dunno, doc,” he shrugged. “Never tried courtin’ someone, you know.”

“I know, I know,” Carver grumbled. “You know, you’re a great listener, Bandit.”

Looking into Bandit’s tired, cold, dead eyes, one could see that yes, he did in fact know he was a good listener, especially after having to hear these exact words being told to him a plethora of times. Far too many times, in his opinion. Doc had a bad habit of repeating himself, nearly as bad a habit as Banker’s natural stutter. But, honestly, Bandit did not really mind - it was comforting to have some sort of repetition, something natural and flowing, a familiar back and forth between the attempts at not dying any time he stepped outside of his few friends’ sight.

So he just stood, with the face of someone who was about to doze the hell off, as Carver grumbled away his woes and stitched his strings up. To the doctor's reminder to take care of himself, he replied with a firm thumbs up, and then he waddled awkwardly into what in an episode might have been the glorious sunset, but in this case was only another door through to the wild.

Leaving the good doctor alone. Wooden fingers drummed against the unpolished counter of his workstation, filling the deathly quiet world with a steady rhythm. An impatience filled his head, that constant nagging feeling to do something, anything. Instantly his thoughts turned to the Banker, the sweet, timid, scared Banker, and those thoughts curled around daring ideas and wishes like ivy growing steadily on an old house's wall; he shoved them away, just as the Banker had shoved him away. Yet they kept coming back, filling his mind over and over. Carver leaned against the wall heavily with the soft thud of wood on wood, rubbing at his face with a grumble. Another day, another lovesick time. He smiled wryly to himself, humoring his conundrum. A doctor's worst patient is themself, he concluded bitterly, and he could not heal his own aching heart, despite his biggest efforts. He slid down the wall, trying to quell his murmuring mind, so absolutely wanting, no, craving, no, needing another’s touch. Specifically, the gentle, shaky, newly restored touch of Banker. But it was not like he could just, just up and ask him! Oh, goodness, no! The gall, the audacity! Carver scowled, stuffing his hands into his pockets, then took out, picking up his saw to go out into the wild. He was running short on needle and thread anyways, especially with how often Bandit was getting himself de-stringed nowadays.

So he would return to his old place, murder decimate destroy harvest some aracknits, and pick up more thread.

On his way, he encountered a bank booth. He only got a glimpse of something - or rather, someone, a particular someone who wore a shirt of the same light blue as that of the sleeves he saw retreating into the dark right before leaving the place completely empty. Carver stared at the empty bank for a little, recalling the man that had been in it but moments before. Then, with a heavy, sorrowful sigh, he forced his legs to move past it. It would not have done much for either of them anyways, standing in front of each other, waiting for something to happen, and that yet, knowing their clashing natures, simply never would. Hefting his saw over his shoulder, he crept into Dead Man’s Gulch -- and then into the place he used to call home.

The sound of the spider-like creatures sent shivers up his wooden spine, the inebriating thrill of the hunt filling his chest. He forced himself to keep calm and still his nerves, knowing the adrenaline rushing in what he could consider veins would only give him shaky hands, like those of the Banker he so cherished. But he could not risk having them, not now. He silently stalked through the halls, a thin and lithe coyote between hazy sand stone creeping up to its prey.

A distinctly recognizable sound caught his attention. Ah-ha!, he thought, crouching furtively out of sight. There it was: one of those awful little yarn devils, scuttling around in the shade of the doctor's old home with his needle tick-tick-ticking all over the wooden floor. A quick, painless bounty of thread for the blade of Carver's saw. The Doc slowly crept closer and closer, trying to hide the glint of his weapon from his eyeless prey, sneaking forward without letting himself make a single sound…

A fulminous zac!, and the aracknit dissolved into a bunch of strings with four needles attached.

Carver grinned, at least, the best he could with a solid mouth, satisfied. He still got it.

He stopped to gather the materials, keeping himself from humming and attracting too many of the little beasties. A skittering passed behind him.  He froze, readying his saw once more. He turned his head ever so slowly, his motions nearly unperceivable... An aracknit rushed by, and he swung, missing, his saw flying out of his nervous grip. He swore under his breath, chasting his own hastiness and going to retrieve it, but another spider ran by him and stole it from under his reaching hand. A hiss, long and slow, and so, so, so very many quiet, ticking aracknits. He tried to creep out of his corner, but found every stealthy pass blocked by yarny webs. Without a weapon, there was no way he could go through an open area. He would lose his strings in a matter of seconds if he even attempted to do so! Color slowly drained out of his vision, and he cursed his worsening luck. He could feel his wooden heart beat, faster and faster. More scampering. He demanded of himself to slow his breathing, and could not.

“Well, well, well, well, well,” the air turned cold. The supposed to be jolly and high voice creaked and rasped lowly, angrily, softly, dangerously.  “What, or rather, who, do we have here, caught in the webs of his own prey?”

Carver stayed silent, going at a crawl to the thinnest web, planning on breaking through it and making a mad dash to the exit. The sound of the Faceless Bandit’s three footsteps clacked loudly in the still, dusty air, the scampering aracknits now far too quiet in comparison to the terrifying approach. Perhaps because they too, as simpleminded as a bug of raw yarn can be, could not help but being afraid of the scarred danger slowly coming closer.

“I didn’t know you were Dr. Jekyll,” Faceless chuckled, making the wood of Carver’s back to ripple in disgust. “Seeing that you’re playing around with Mr. Hyde.”

Doc Carver scowled. Goodness, how much he despised the other’s use of terrible puns.

“Stop playing around, my dear Doctor,” his words turned the land foul. The dead shivered and rose, disturbed from what should have been their peaceful eternal rest. “You can’t avoid me forever, you know….”

‘Yeah, right’, Carver rolled his eyes, then refocused onto the web he planned on escaping through. He poised himself to run, breathing in, waiting for Faceless to turn around… and the moment he did, he bolted with a, “Ha !”

It was a mistake.

A grave one.

Of course it was all planned out, of course there would not be a weak spot. After all, wherever a bone breaks, it becomes stronger than before.

Dozens and dozens of aracknits surrounded him, wooly fangs bared. Some trembled, others ducked away, and Carver realized that--

“They listen to me,” Faceless droned behind him. He grew very still. “Out of fear, yes, but still… aren’t they so cute? So sweet? So helpful?”

The doctor ran into the crowd of the small eight legged monsters, the spiders parting like a sea, but also like a sea, instantly drove back.

An aracknit jumped at Carver, and he tried to bat it away with his open arm, but it just scampered onto him, leaving a woven strand over his wrist, and jumped away.

Another did the same to his other side, and he struggled even more, despite the fact that he was given less and less ability to do so.

He felt a string snap, and his left leg gave out, leaving him stumbling to the ground. Second came the right arm. He screamed, not to ask for help, knowing no one would hear him, but to try and bolster his own strength: he bashed an aracknit down and restringed him arm, then going back to fighting with every ounce of strength he could have found desperately still kicking in his wooden limbs.

The aracknits kept coming, the few dozens that were cornering him turning into a swarm that only grew bigger at every turn of his head, crawling out of every single nook and cranny. They bit down on his strings almost faster than he could sew them back up (but luckily, not quite as fast), all while stabbing his legs with their small damned needles as they attempted to climb him, possibly to feed off of him, maybe to try to escape their terrifying master by reaching the top of the doctor's head.

Carver felt their webs wrap around him, pulling him back, swirling around him tight, tighter than the knot of a noose, tying him to the ground and the walls, nearly forcing him on his knees. He screamed - not to be heard, not to gather strength: he screamed in pure terror, almost as though he hoped the sound of his voice would delay the inevitable.

A fly. He was a fly, a careless naive fly, who had thought he could outrun the spiders only to fall in their mother's trap, the hunter becoming the hunted - and soon to be the slaughtered.

He gave one last weakened kick before his legs became a useless mermaid’s tail on land, only barely managing to hit an aracknit strong enough to shoo it away before the string wavered away, dropping onto ash. The little beastie tumbled over, legs frantically moving in a terrified attempt to scramble back onto them, and he pitied it, the shared pain of two prisoners trapped beyond their powers, and he wished that it could get to its feet, to give him a sign of hope that he too would rise, but alas.

It was crushed under the handle of an approaching scythe.

Its needles stiffened and twitched, fighting one last time against their lightning quick rigor mortis; then, it dissolved into a puddle of string under Carver's horrified eyes.

Silence. Accursed, blasphemous, terrifying silence. All the doctor could hear was his own panting breath. He had one string left, and a scythe tugged on it for a moment before sliding down his face, making his head tilt this way and that, as if inspecting a specimen most curiously.

The two puppets were still, and silent.

Not a spider crawled, not a soul moved, nothing breathed and it was all so strikingly obvious to Carver. Of course, of course, why should he have gone back here? He should have baited the aracknits out instead of going in like a fool, a cretin, a pup still unaware of the sly tactics of hunting, thinking it all as fun and games. How foolish he had been!

He wished that he was somewhere else.

Somewhere safe.

Somewhere to feel at home.

Hanging up his apron in the hall after a fulfilling day of making puppets feel better and smile, going into a cozy living room to join hands with a smiling Banker, to rest with tea in front of a warm fire and good book, simple domestic perfection and tranquility. That was all he wanted. Was it really too much to ask for…?

It seemed so.

A golden tear bubbled up in his eye, and he blinked rapidly to force it away.

It slid down his face, trailing down his scar.

His wooden skin crawled as a scarred and ripped hand came to rest on that mark, and he turned icy cold, shivering. God, how he wished a different, trembling, gentle hand were there! Even if he were in the same position, bound and inflexible and defenseless, he would have given anything for it. For that sweet intoxicating touch, the throne of which was instead being usurped by dirty, loathing, scratching fingers.

“Oh, my dearest Doctor Carver,” the mangled puppet laughed, his words airless. “You always were my least favorite. Always stealing from me those delightful strings of the weakened, of the broken and bent. And you, so resilient and resistant! Why so much of a fuss, hm?”

The doctor felt a knot tie in his throat. He forced himself to stare straight at the eyeless being looming cruelly before him in total defiance: if he was going to die there and then, he would have not given that piece of tumbleweed the satisfaction of seeing him bend his head to him.

“What is it, Doc?” the Faceless hissed, yanking him with annoyance at his silence, scratching at his face, gouging three sharp cuts under his scar that would have bled if the doctor had blood instead of sap, which oozed out of the crevices. “Cat got your tongue? Or did you ever have one? I doubt it, seeing as you’re quite dumb right now.”

Carver inhaled with a low growl.

“Go to hell.” he merely grumbled.

“Ooh, how raunchy,” Faceless snarked back, cutting into his own face with his scythe to display any kind of expression, the smirk he left in his own face jagged and twisted. Carver felt his stomach churn with frost at the sight, so crude and, and unnatural. The scythe returned to the bottom of his chin, sliding up to the top of his head to hook around the string that resided there. Carver shivered as he felt his singular string slowly sawed at.

The Faceless Bandit held his head firmly with one hand, pulled back his arm a little, swiftly, and-

Shhh.

Then there was nothing.

Death felt so weird, the doctor thought.

He had imagined it crueler, darker, colder, more painful. Lonelier.

Instead he felt only… suspended. As if in wait. For what, he could not tell. But it was a peaceful waiting, and he felt far from afraid.

He was enveloped into a gentle, vast hold. A warm, ginormous finger touched his face, tapping each of his eyes, and he felt air seep into his lungs once more.

Another hand carefully, gently, cautiously and lovingly placed strings onto his limbs.

The hands slowly vanished, and he found himself put into something enclosing and… safe?

And then he felt alive.

Which was not ideal, because it made him realize that he was in a claustrophobic and dark space, and with his most recent memories being those of his body tied up in yarn among an army of aracknits and every last one of his strings being cut by the cruel scythe of a criminal lacking a face, so he panicked and kicked the air in front of himself as hard as he could to escape his dark prison.

The Banker nearly had a heart attack when the coffin next to bank opened with a loud noise - only nearly, because he did not actually have a heart or circulatory system.

“B-Bandit? Is, is that you?” Banker’s sweet, timid, wonderful wonderful wonderful beautiful darling amazing incredible voice rang out in the empty room. The doctor pleaded in his heart, unable to find his voice, still gasping and panting, trembling and teary, ‘Oh, please, say more, speak more, keep talking, fill the void.’ There were quiet footsteps, the Banker creeping slowly out of his booth. “L-Lorelei? L-Lookout? Uh, um, Mr., Mr. West?”

And then he stood before him, looking down at the Doctor with four wide eyes.

Carver knew he was a mess, he knew he was shaking and sitting in the bottom of a coffin like container as his tears froze in his eyes, but the moment he saw the Banker looking down at him, silently, mouth open in a slight shock, he felt his frosted heart melt, finally filling his body with relieving warmth, color finally returning to his vision, and his shoulders finally untensed as he looked up at him with total and complete admiration.

The Banker stood, fidgeting with his hands nervously. He was about to start scratching them, but he stopped himself: the doctor had put a lot of time and… and care (wonderful, dutiful, devoted care, whispered the ghost of a thought in his mind) into that coat of paint. He couldn't just… he couldn't just ruin it like that. And, well, he couldn't, he couldn't just leave him there, hazy and frightened and in need of help, either.

He lent him his hand as that terrible fear gnawed at his stomach: “I, I didn't expect you to, to be here, D-Doc.”

Carver grabbed the appendix with both hands, pressing his fingers against its palms. He did not make any motion to stand up; completely honestly, he did not want to. He just wanted to hold it, to hold him, to feel the other puppet's arm curl against him, a soft, shy and gentle shield of blue and brown hues, of tremors and stutters, warming him endlessly. Oh, how he needed it! How he wished for it terribly, now and forever...

“D-Doc Carver?” the Banker felt that fire burn from his fingertips, spreading up his arm. He swallowed roughly to keep it from his face. “D-do you need to make a c-claim?”

“Yes,” he breathed, and pulled Banker’s hand down, close to his heart. Banker stared at him with wide eyes, big, terrified eyes. “Yes, I do, please, Banker, please… grant me this one claim.”

Banker trembled, and still, he asked; “What?”

“I've just been struck down with death,” Carver nearly whispered, eyes glazed with tears. “I have lost my confidence, please, Banker, dear, dear Banker of mine, please, kiss me with life, restore my confidence, please, that's the only claim I ask of you.”

Carver squeezed the hand tight, afraid it would escape his grip, knowing it could.

“K-kiss you?” Banker squeaked, eyes wide, the searing sensations spreading all over his face and neck, but, how enrapturing and captivating those burns were! And how loud the echo of the thought he'd been sure to have killed was! His fear tugged him away, or so it tried, for his body wouldn't move an inch.

Carver nodded, his eyes pleading, as he rubbed his face on the back of the hand, murmuring ‘please, please’ over and over, knowing rejection would have killed him on the spot, and yet not finding the will to care for it. Though he wouldn't beg for life from the Faceless Bandit that so hated him, he would beg and plead for death from the Banker he so adored.

The Banker breathed heavily, shivering. His head shook ever so slightly.

“N, no, no…” he whispered as he kneeled in front of the other puppet; “No, no…”, as he let the doctor cup his cheeks and rub his face on them; “No, no, no, no…”, as he returned the other's affection, kissing him in the way a puppet can kiss, wooden faces scratching ever so softly against each other, slowly, then faster; “No, no, no…”, as his fingers finally curled around the stitches of Carver's scar, stroking it idly, pushing away the tears that slowly dripped from the other’s face, finally seeing his fear as what it was: no fear at all, not even close to fear, even. It was something softer, something that he had selfishly denied himself through his own blindness. Oh, what good were four eyes when he could not use them to see what was right in front of him? What good was the blessing of sight without letting himself revel in the beautiful image in front of him? What good was living to play a part and nothing more if it did not allow him to have the gift of, the, no, his, his dear, dear, darling doctor to gaze upon?

He held Carver closer, nuzzling harder against him. The fire divamping inside him boiled and burned, it begged to be released, to be imprinted on the other puppet for all to see. He was kissing it into Doc, but it was not, it could not be enough. A single face was too restrictive, and he had to improvise, he had to figure out a way to make it more, to have more of the doctor pinned under him, to show him that yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, this was right and wanted and good.

His hand begrudgingly left the side of Carver's head and instead grabbed with all of its strength his arm. The good doctor nearly jumped up from his seat in the case, surprised, left breathless. His own fingers curled around the Banker's forearm, but the kiss they pressed against him was weak, not nearly as deep and passionate as the one pushing into his limb, far more shy and trembling, a near reverse of their usual attitudes. Carver’s whole being shivered with warmth. And oh, oh!, it was so good! So very good, so very delicious, the sensation spreading from that long, long kiss to the rest of his body… goodness, he was addicted to it already. That was it, his only wish, his reason to live. All he wanted was for that magnificent pressure to never soften and leave.

But the Banker had other plans. For him, it was too long, too time consuming; it didn't let him give Carver everything they both wanted desperately after letting so much time pass by. So instead he began to grab and release, grab and release, fast and hungry, pressing quick hasty kisses all over the doctor. On his arms, his chest, his neck, his shoulders, his sides - to hell with his part!, to hell with his fear! - even reaching further down, gripping Carver’s hips and legs in a frenzy, dominated by nothing but the burning embers inside of his wooden frame that pushed him to love and love and love again.

Carver was too slow to reply to those attentions, and he found himself overwhelmed. He was in an almost comatose bliss, jolting and shivering with little gasps and murmurs of, “Yes, yes, p-please, yes….”, only barely managing to nuzzle back his lover's face, goodness gracious, this was it, the moment he always dreamed of, his lover, they were lovers now. He did not feel like himself, not at all. He was out of his body, out of his mind, looking down on that scene from a warm cloud of ecstasy, the prickling of pleasure taking over him in waves.

It took what felt like ages, for the Banker's wild rush of claiming Carver as his to consume itself. It exhausted them both, to the point where they were moments away from collapsing entirely in the box Carver rested in, seconds from slipping into pure bliss and tranquility. They held each other close as they rested, panting softly, Banker’s hand finally finding its place on Carver’s cheek, gently trailing the scar there. Then he felt the ridges, his eyes widening, and he pulled away a bit to inspect the mark, and to his horror and sadness found the three fresh cuts under his hand.

“C-Carver, you, you’re hurt!” he exclaimed, his gentle shaky fingers turning the doctor’s head to inspect the cuts better. “O-Oh dear, why didn't, why didn’t you t-tell me?”

“It’s fine, it really is,” Carver reassured him, though he leaned into and reveled in his touch. “It’s nothing that I can’t mend.”

Banker frowned at that, and so Carver might have even said something more, had a not-so-freshly-painted-anymore visage not rubbed gently on his wounds, kissing away the sap seeping from the small gouges. The kiss threw him for an incredulous loop, stunning him. Had his wood been replaced by flesh, he would have been redder than a blooming hibiscus.

Perhaps it was seeing the doctor like that that slowly brought the four-eyed puppet to his senses. All those newly formed memories reverberated in his mind, slowly becoming clear, first their gentle, almost reluctant, kiss, then the frenzied adrenalinic boiling and burning and exploding cravings that had taken control of him, and finally, when he realized the spontaneous act of kissing those little scrapes, he finally got a grasp on his actions. He gradually began shaking, hands going to cover his mouth already muttering apologies, his legs trying to push him to his feet - oh, but Carver would not have any of it.

His gentle grip tightened around the other's waist, keeping him from escaping into the dark of his shame. Banker would have blushed furiously had he skin, feeling the rippling strength of Doc Carver’s arm around him, his breath hitching as those thoughts that he thought he killed earlier swarmed back into his mind. The doctor collected himself as well, slowly, naturally slipping back into his ordinarily calm and proper self, just like the Banker had returned to his anxieties and worries, their regular personalities bleeding back into their forms as if regaining consciousness after a long sleep.

“Dear,” goodness, how wonderful it felt to say that, “Dear, darling, love, what's troubling you?”

“I- I, I… Doc, I-”

“Carver, dear, please. Carver is just fine.”

“I, I… Car, Carver, I didn't - oh, oh god, I'm, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean-”

“Oh, you did!” the doctor adamantly insisted, his eyes widening, but in complete confidence. “We’re… us now. It’s okay, we’re okay… I’m here, you’re here, it’s okay. We… we are good.”

The Banker tried shrinking himself in the other's arms without much success. Carver merely huffed, an adoring look in his eyes, and brought him closer. His gentle nuzzles onto his recently repainted cheek were a balm for the Banker's nerves.

“There's nothing to fear, my darling.” he murmured into the puppet’s ears, feeling him relax from his smooth accent, melting against him in a pleasant warmth, “Hm, but your booth… it seems quite comfortable, wouldn't you say?”

The other nodded, humming absentmindedly, one of his hands trailing up Carver’s arm, twirling around his neck to run over his hair. He had always wondered how it felt, and now found that it was not only wood, but covered in felt to give it a soft velvety texture, and the same went for his handlebar moustache. Come to think of it, nearly everything about the doctor was just so soft and warmly inviting.

“Should we head over to it, then?” Carver's voice caught up to him, pulling him back to reality, yet sending him from one pleasant distraction to another. He barely had to answer, the slightest sigh and the smallest nod, and the doctor slid a firm and strong hand under his knees, and rose him up, carrying him into the bank much like a newly wed groom carries his beloved man into their just made house.

There was some cloth folded in a corner, arranged as if to simulate what could have once seemed like a bed which clearly had been abandoned for the anxious Banker’s many sleepless nights, him preferring instead to pass out in fear on his counter.

The doctor laid him on top of the covers gently before positioning himself on top of him. One of his hands tenderly stroked his cheek, his legs straddling the Banker, looking down at him, eyes shielded by his glasses, though behind those lenses, his eyes were full of pure admiration.

The four-eyed puppet adjusted himself under his weight almost sleepily: “Carver, love…” oh, to be called like that forever and always, what shivers did it send down his spine!, “What…”

“Please, my dearest.” Carver leaned down to press kisses to his throat, and purred against his neck, hands pressing light kisses with thumbs swirling on wooden skin so gently, “You don't truly think I am sated of your kisses? I waited so long for you…”

The Banker sighed blissfully, body melting and becoming as soft as warm clay. He wrapped his arms around his dear, dear lover and let his head fall back on the bed that hadn't seen him in weeks, basking in the wonderful burn enveloping him.

How curious, he thought to himself. He could hear a hummingbird sing in the back of his mind.

For some odd reason, he heard Bandit clear his throat in the back of his mind too.

Then Doc Carver let out a small grumbling shriek, rolling over and tumbling off of a Banker too hazy to notice anything.

“H-Hello Bandit!” Carver stumbled over his words as the cowboy looked at them from the counter where his elbow was leaning on. The four-eyed puppet called for him needily, drawling out the last part of the doctor’s name, his grasp on reality basically non-existent. Carver turned bright red. “F-fancy seeing you here….”

“Sure is, Doc, sure is.” Showdown smiled, cheek resting in his hand, giving him a quick wink. “Mind if I make a deposit?”

“Um, sure,” the doctor stuttered, rushing to the desk to swipe the cash, hastily dumping it in a vault labeled ‘SHOWDOWN BANDIT’.

The cowboy tipped his hat politely: “Thanks, Doc.”

“N-no problem,” he mumbled, staring at the ground.

“Now I suggest ya go back to yer other business. He sounds pretty… um… critical.” Showdown nodded in the direction of the lovestruck Banker. The doctor tried to swallow, and failed. “Y’know what I mean, Doc?”

“Carveeeer, love, please… please, where did you go?” the poor soul lamented, turning on the bed. “You're so cruel, so cruel… ! Oh, love, please… please, I need you… !”

“I know.” Carver muttered to Showdown, closing the Bank’s shutters and swiftly turning around, rushing back into the arms of his darling, finally together.

[sellyoursoulforagoodfic]

Bang, Bang

Dredd x reader

Summary: Some good old fashioned hurt/comfort. Ya get shot on the job.

Word Count: 2378

Just two months into her new, “partnership” with one Judge Lily Wolfe saw Y/N both homicidal and scared for her very life. Since the redhead was still on assessment, she’d been choosing what cases they took. Boy was that a mistake. With eyes bigger than her ammo belt, Lily decided to take a case that they were woefully under qualified for: an obviously well-connected drug cartel that’d been causing issues all over the sector.

Like a good little guard dog, Y/N said nothing and tried to handle the case as quietly as possible. Of course that did nothing to silence the glory-hunting rookie. Wolfe busted in gun a blazing and had gotten the two of them pinned in a heavy dumpster in the process since it was the only semi-armored cover around.

While the idiotic partner fired blindly at the cartel, Y/N frantically put out a call for backup. “Y/LN to control! We’ve got two Judges under fire at Willow Haven! Requesting backup immediately!”

Almost instantly, a familiar, gravely voice spoke over the communicator. “Dredd to control. I’m inbound to their location.” Those words alone almost made Y/N weep in relief.

“Copy that, Dredd.”

Over the next several minutes, Y/N managed to take out six of their attackers with a lucky high-ex round while Lily still fired blindly in their general direction. Soon enough, more gunfire joined the fray, but fewer bullets were flying towards the two female Judges. Y/N could only hope it was because Dredd had finally arrived. Things naturally couldn’t go smoothly just because of that, though, so of course a bullet made it into their cover and started to ricochet until it tore through Lily’s calf all the way through and proceeded to embed itself in Y/N’s shoulder blade.

Armor piercing, she realized because otherwise it shouldn’t have made it through the thick plating of her armor. While Lily cried in pain, Y/N tried to keep her verbal complaining down to grunts so she could hear what was going on around them. Heavy bootsteps greeted her as the firing stopped. A sigh of relief left Y/N when she saw her husband’s beat-up helmet over the rim of the dumpster.

“Took you long enough,” she weezed.

“Dredd to control,” he reported to his communicator, “seventeen bodies for resyke and we need a medevac for Y/LN and Wolfe.”

“Copy,” the responder answered.

“I thought I was the one with shoulder issues,” Dredd said lightly to mask the worry that was rising.

Lily cried louder, trying to pull his attention to her. “Aren’t you going to help me?” she demanded.

His head shifted so that he was frowning at the redhead. “It’s a leg wound that’s nowhere near a major artery. You should be able to do a basic field dressing on that by yourself. She still has shrapnel and a slug in her bone--Stop moving it, woman!” Dredd snapped when he saw his wife try to climb out of the now-useless shelter.

“I’m not gonna stay in this fucking thing all day.”

The man huffed as he rolled his eyes. Given their relationship, it was a feat made easy out of familiarity to lift her out of the dumpster without jarring her shoulder too much. That didn’t stop the almost-inaudible whimper of pain that escaped her from causing guilt to lance through his heart. Only years of practice kept his signature scowl on his face instead of a look of panic.

“Help her out,” Y/N instructed quietly after he set her down, “or she won’t shut up about it.”

With much less care, Dredd hauled the sorry excuse for a Judge onto the street where she then collapsed holding her leg. Y/N just stood there with her arm hanging limply as she tried not to move it. It was all Y/N and Dredd could do to avoid leaning against the other. Both of them were masters of Judge Professionalism, so they managed to not show what either was feeling.

Even so, Y/N let out an exhausted sigh when the medical transport finally arrived.

Dredd gave a subtle nod to his wife before speaking into his communicator once more, “Dredd to Control. I’m going back out on patrol.”

“Copy that, Dredd. The other Judges’ bikes will be transported back to their places of residence.”

Even through his helmet, Y/N could see the statement “See you at home” written across her husband’s features. She nodded ever so slightly, and then he was gone.

It was when Lily was administered an anesthetic that the redhead became annoying once more. “That man never fucking changes does he? You’re always the special one for some reason, and the rest of us aren’t even worth the trash beneath his boots.”

“That’s bullshit,” Y/N snapped. “He doesn’t like you because you’ve never respected him. You just wanted to fuck him. He’s perfectly civil--if a bit harsh--to everyone else at the Hall,” Y/N muttered that last bit.

“That’s not true!” Lily exclaimed. “He liked me back when I was at the Academy. Sure he was hard on me, but he just wanted me to be a good Judge.”

Every fiber of Y/N’s being wanted to laugh at that insane notion. Joseph absolutely hated the woman, that much Y/N knew for sure. “What exactly makes you think he liked you?”

“Well, he always listened to me--” No he didn’t. “And he was more attentive to my needs . . .” What the fuck? “And he had me stay after classes sometimes.”

Part of Y/N wanted to know what the redhead’s reaction to the truth would be. What if she told Lily that she almost fucked on the gym floor after that first spar? What if she pulled out the ring she kept on a chain that signified their marriage? But she did neither.

Instead she just shrugged. “Whatever you say.”

Due to the eternal overabundance of people at the hospital--even the one just for Judges--Y/N and Lily were treated in the same room. At no point did the itch to drive the scalpel into her partner’s brain leave Y/N as she listened to her whine and cry while her leg got stitched up. Even while Y/N was stripped from the waist up except for a sports bra and under the doctor’s knife without even a local anesthetic due to a shortage, the redhead kept complaining. Y/N’s hand just clenched around her exposed wedding ring to both comfort herself and hide it from view. She only really tuned back into the room when the doctor started instructing them on what to do for the next few days.

“Wolfe, take it easy until Monday; then go back on patrol. Y/LN, you’re going to have to be extremely careful about infection, and it’s gonna take two weeks for you to be back on duty. I’ll tell the Chief to have someone help you around the house until then.”

“I don’t need a babysitter.”

“Don’t think I’ve forgotten about how you ignored your broken foot for three days last year. Judge or not, you’re going to let someone help you. Oh look. You’re ride’s here.”

Y/N saw Lily’s face light up before she knew who had just entered the room. “Dredd! I knew you cared!” the redhead exclaimed.

Y/N watched her husband’s frown deepen.

“You come here to check on me?” Lily flirted.

Dredd scoffed. “No. I’m here to escort her home. You are going home to your parents. Your mother has been screaming for my head ever since I saved your sorry ass. Y/LN, are you ready?”

She nodded once the doctor secured her arm in a sling. At that point she’d stiffly donned her tank top, and her armor was slung around her loosely.

“But who’s gonna help me?” Lily whined, limping after them as they set into the hall.

“Not my problem.”

It wasn’t too difficult to slip away from the unwelcome tag-along in the corridors of the hospital luckily, and in minutes the couple was standing next to Dredd’s on-duty bike. “You’re sitting in front of me this time,” he informed her.

“Why?”

“That way I can make sure you don’t fall off. Get on.”

She didn’t put up too much of a fight, and if it was obvious how much she enjoyed leaning back against his solid frame despite the minor pain it caused, Dredd said nothing about it. And if he pulled her closer to his body before taking off, she said nothing.

Dredd carefully picked her up as soon as he parked outside their residence. “Don’t even say anything, sweetheart,” he cut off her inevitable protest. “When I heard you call, I thought I was gonna find your body. Let me do the husband thing for once.”

Y/N sighed. “Okay. Whatever you say, babe.”

She could feel his incredulous gaze as he kicked their front door closed behind them. “Since when do you call me ‘babe’?” She took off his helmet and placed it on the table.

“Yeah, no, you’re right. That felt wrong.” Her nose scrunched up at how weird that was. The discomfort was worth it when she saw his face squish into a genuine smile, dimples and all. Her breath hitched at the relaxed joy that caused his hazel eyes squeeze shut as he laughed. Even for her it was rare to see him so happy. It almost felt like she was falling for him all over again.

When Dredd slightly composed himself, he gingerly set his wife down on the bed. “What?” he asked, still chuckling when he noticed the more-fond-than-usual look on her face.

She pulled him down to her level so she could kiss his still-smiling lips. “I just love you more than I can figure out how to say.”

He lightly bumped his nose against hers. “And I love you . . . but we really need to get you out of your uniform.”

“Joseph . . .”

A kiss was pressed to her temple before Dredd pulled her to her feet. “Do it and I’ll cook dinner.”

Y/N grinned. “Now you’re speaking my language.”

That night Dredd woke to the sound of his wife whimpering in her sleep. She was lying on her stomach against his chest at his insistence to keep her from rolling onto her injury. The hand that clenched against the flesh of his chest told him that she was having a nightmare. He turned to kiss the top of her head. 

“Sweetheart, wake up,” he murmured.

Her face screwed up, but she didn’t wake. “Joe, no,” she pleaded desperately in her sleep.

“I’m right here. Wake up, Y/N. Come on.”

With a violent jerk, the woman jumped awake. Her wide blue eyes flitted about, unseeing as Dredd watched her grapple with the waking world. He gently rubbed his hand along her shoulder where the skin was exposed because she’d swiped on of his shirts to sleep in and it didn’t fit well. It took several minutes for Y/N to come back to reality, during which Dredd patiently whispered soft assurances that they were both okay.

The fog noticeably lifted, and tears filled Y/N’s eyes when she saw his concerned hazel ones. A week cry of “Joseph” left her lips in the form of a sob. And that was all the prompting Dredd needed to sit up and pull her onto his lap so he could curl around her protectively. Her fingers dug into the bare flesh of his chest, but he couldn’t care less about the tiny cuts caused by her nails.

“I’ve got you, sweetheart,” Dredd breathed. “I’ve got you.”

“Joseph,” she whimpered, “I-I saw you--”

“It wasn’t real,” he promised. “What do you feel under your hand?” When she remained silent for too long, he repeated the question. “What do you feel?”

Y/N didn’t raise her head to reply. “Your heart.”

“I’m fine. I’m here. We’re here.” Dredd was steadily placing light kisses wherever he could reach. “My heart is beating only for you just like always.”

Gradually, her grip on him relaxed. “Sorry I woke you up.”

Dredd scoffed and rolled his eyes. “Only you would apologize for having a bad dream.” He set his cheek against the top of her head. “Was it about yesterday?” At her weak nod, he sighed. “Is there anything I can do?”

She shook her head. “Just be you.”

“Well, that’s easy,” he quipped, earning a half-hearted smile. “We gonna try to get some more sleep or do I need to make coffee?”

“Joseph, I’m not gonna make you stay up with me just because I can’t sleep.”

Once again, Dredd rolled his eyes. Instead of responding verbally, he scooted off the bed and started walking to the kitchen while carrying his wife. Y/N found herself set on the counter as Dredd set up their coffee pot. He made sure that he as he worked he was always touching her. Nightmares like this weren’t uncommon with  them given their line of work, so both were well-accustomed to handling this situation. Nights like this meant constant touching to make sure the other was alive. Others just required the spouse to retrieve the bottle of bourbon stashed at the back of their fridge.

Several minutes later, Y/N was wrapped around Dredd’s back as he leaned against the counter. She kissed the curve of his neck. “Thank you.”

Dredd swallowed a gulp of the coffee that was serving to keep him awake. “That’s what I’m here for, sweetheart.”

Eventually, Dredd felt his wife’s head drop heavily onto his shoulder. He couldn’t help the tiny smile that pulled at the corners of his mouth, knowing that Y/N had finally nodded off. Carefully, he set down his near-empty mug and turned to pick her up. It proved how often this happened since he was able to lift her and subsequently deposit her onto their bed without waking her.

Over the next several minutes, Dredd maneuvered her so that she was lying on him much like she had been a couple hours earlier. With one last kiss pressed to the top of her head, he drifted off too.

[blueishfood]

Wind in our sails (Chapter 5)

Fandom/Ship: Maraudrer era in a Pirates of the Caribbean au! Jily, Dobby x Winky, Alice x Frank,

Summary:

“Lily Evans, a young Lady of El Puerto Del Rey, meets Lucius Malfoy for the first time as she is promised to him. Malfoy is one of the few counts of Slytherin Island, a persuasive and revolting man. Miss Evans sees no way out of the nightmare her parents has landed her in.

That is until the infamous Marauder, a known and feared pirate ship sailed by Captain James Potter, attacks The Serpent on their way to her wedding. Lily sees and escape and grabs on tight.

Set sail with Lily Evans as she joins Captain James Potter and his mates in swashbuckling adventures of romance, mystery and lionhearted bravery.”

Warning(s): Fighting

Words: 2,5 K

A/N: Now this is the plot I was talking about!

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

The captain was drunk.

His first mate was avoiding the cabin, that was the first sign. Then, when Winky was shouted out of his cabin for bringing food, Lily really understood what was going on.

This drinking had been going on for some while now. Apparently, according to the other pirates, it wasn’t normal when it came to captain Potter. It had only started after the attack on Malfoy’s ship, but this day was particularly bad. She had heard bottles breaking every time she walked past his door.

Lily had been trying to find a secure location to fix up her bindings, which came loose every now and then, when Potter opened his door to see her standing outside. He reeked of rum, and his eyes were unfocused. She watched as he swayed with the waves in his doorframe. He lent forward, grabbed her jaw so that she would look at him and sighed.

“Right,” he poked her nose, “It’s you, Runt.” Lily frowned at the nickname and took a step away. He reeked of rum.

Potter looked like he had forgotten what he was supposed to do and walked back into his cabin. Right before the door swung shut, he turned around with a finger in the air. He stopped the door with a surprisingly steady foot and put a hand on Lily’s shoulder.

“Will you please get me another bottle of rum?” His words slurred, but Lily nodded to him with wide eyes.

“Yes, captain.” She turned around, stopped, and glanced back at the intoxicated man, “sit tight.”, she commanded, before she sprinted down the hall.

Lily returned with two green bottles. Sirius had opened the rum cellar for her and stuffed the two bottles in her arms before she could object. “He’s better off sleeping,” the first mate muttered and walked away. Seemed he didn’t like the drunk version of his best friend.

Potter was fiddling with the papers on his desk when Lily walked in. She didn’t manage to see what they held, but it seemed awfully important to him. Perhaps she could manage sneaking back when he was sleeping off the booze.

“Thank you…” -he picked one bottle out of her grip and popped it open- “very much.”

Lily nodded, placing the other bottle on the edge of his desk. When she was about to leave, however, a hand stopped her.

“Boy,” the Captain was still looking at his new bottle, pulling her back to his desk at the same time. “Tell me, did you see the knife?” Lily frowned.

“Knife?” She knew of many knifes on this ship but had no idea what the Captain was on about. She could see him frowning at his own sentence and waited as he gathered his thoughts.

“Not knife,” he gestured to the papers on his desk, “wife. The wife.”

Lily froze. Did he know? How could he have known?

Had he seen her somewhere? Did someone let the secret slip, and if so, why hadn’t he already killed her? Slowly she lifted her eyes, they were like lead in her sockets. After an eternity she was able to see the captain again. She hoped beyond hope that the tears in her eyes weren’t visible.

But the captain wasn’t looking at her. He had turned around. Potter took another swig of the bottle and muttered a few curses.

“The wife of that serpent… slug eating… man hunting savage… bloody death eater… disgusting rat,” it was impossible to hear every word, but from the looks of it, James Potter hated Malfoy more than he let on. Which meant that his hatred for Lily would be just as great. If not worse.

He turned back to her and gestured to the papers again. Lily had not dared look at them yet, but now he was encouraging her to.

“Have you seen her? Anywhere?”

Lily’s eyes landed on her own face. Younger than she was now. Happier. She had never seen that drawing before. It was drawn in simple coal, and it featured a ten-year-old Lily Evans, grinning with flowers in her hair.

She let out a small gasp. Potter didn’t seem to hear.

“She is older now. In her twentieth winter or something.” Lily was not able to respond. Her head was full of questions. How had he gotten that drawing? Why did he need to find her? Who was this man?

“She was getting married to that rat… that, that snake. And he works for…” he trailed off, completely forgetting what he was talking about and starting a new conversation. Lily tried listening carefully to his drunken ranting, but it was hard to catch the words.

“If he gets hold of the girl… the girl.” He turned around suddenly, as if seeing Lily for the first time, and said, “This war, I don’t want a war, runt.” She could see the dull glint in his eyes, and knew he wasn’t entirely gone.

This talk couldn’t be just rubbish, but war? There had not been war, real war in this region for years now. Pirate squabbles and attacks happened, yes, but never all out war.

“Boy!” His hair was wild. Lily had not seen it before now, but it stuck out in all angles.

“Did you see her?” His voice hit the damp wooden walls like crashing waves, his eyes were darker than when she had brought him the rum. They seemed more focused, but also a lot angrier. She could count the drops of sweat on his forehead.

“I didn’t see her, sir. As I said, no woman was picked up, Captain.” The sentence sounded forced, the lump in her throat was becoming hard to keep down.

The Captain’s shoulders slumped. He sighed heavily and sat down on the wooden chair beside his desk. His grip on the rum was loose. Lily decided to stand awkwardly in the middle of the room, not knowing if she was dismissed or not.

“Can I ask why you are looking for her, Captain?” she muttered after a while, his heavy breathing becoming too much and too little for her to listen to. His anger was gone now, and when he looked at her Lily could only see defeat. He swallowed heavily, pushing a few strands of dark hair from his sweat-covered forehead.

“I knew her.” Potter was stopped by the door busting open. Lily straightened her back like a plank and turned to the intruder. The growl that slipped from Sirius lips told Lily to get out. She didn’t hesitate.

She did not know James Potter, a pirate from the seven seas. She had almost never been allowed to travel by the ocean, and she had certainly never been acquainted with pirates. The Captain was lying, that was certain, but why would he feel the need to lye to a young sailor? Lily had always thought people tended to be more truthful when they were drunk, but this clearly wasn’t the case with Potter. Whatever he was hiding, Lily was going to figure it out.

When dinner was served, Lily was about to collapse from exhaustion. The sun had been shining harshly today, hitting them like a whip whether they worked or not. But with the shining ball dipping into the ocean, light red clouds coloring the horizon, the crew placed themselves all over the deck. Bowls in their lap, they lent on the railing or sat on barrels in the welcome shade.

When Lily had gotten her share of food, she sat down next to Alice and Frank.

Frank Longbottom was one of the larger men in the crew, he seemed like the exact opposite of quaint Alice Prewitt, but somehow, they fit perfectly. They were apparently a thing; Lily just hadn’t had the time to notice.

Frank was poking his bit of salted beef while Alice gnawed at her ship biscuit. Lily took a bite of the meat and frowned.

“This tastes like-” Lily stopped and glanced up at Alice who was lifting an eyebrow. She re phrased the sentence; “It’s edible.”

Frank snorted.

“Barely,” he coughed heavily behind a large hand and Alice punched his shoulder. They laughed for a moment while Dobby and Winky joined them.

“Shut up,” Alice rolled her eyes at Frank’s grinning, “it’s all I can work with at the moment.” Lily didn’t miss the scowl Alice directed at the oblivious Captain.

Thankfully he had slept off the liquor and was now back to working his load. Apparently, no one knew what it was about, but the crew weren’t happy.

“Have you heard about the recruiting?” Lily looked at Dobby who was currently speaking through a mouthful of food. It didn’t seem like he minded the slight aroma of mould. Alice looked pleased.

“Recruiting?” Lily asked while Winky was scolding her husband for the indecency. Dobby nodded, leaning forward to spill the gossip.

“Someone is collecting votes to become captain.” Dobby looked at each one of them individually, hunting for reaction. Frank laughed, arms stretching to the light blue sky.

“Potter has been captain for years,” -he stabbed his knife in the table as if it was normal- “he’s well liked.”

There was a short silence broken by Winky.

“It has been a while since his last successful raid.”

“You think that’s enough?” Lily asked, still new to this pirate life. Winky shrugged in response. They once again ate in silence.

“Who is it?” Lily’s question was directed at Dobby. He grabbed a hold of the railing he was sitting on, and leaned back, balancing on the wood.

“Well who do you think?” he asked, swinging one leg over the railing. Lily looked for answers in the group, but they all avoided her gaze. She shrugged. Dobby rolled his eyes like it was obvious.

“Black.”

Lily frowned. That didn’t seem believable.

“He’s the Captain’s best friend, is he not?” Alice sighed at Lily’s guess, picking up her plate.

“They often are,” she said before leaving. Winky had started picking on her sleeve nervously.

“They say you only get to know the identity of the recruiter after you have claimed Prongs to be an unfit Captain,” Dobby stated, and picked an uneaten piece of meat from Winky’s plate, chewing on in thoughtfully. “But Padfoot is the only one who could gather enough votes, the only one with enough experience and trust...”

Black called for Dobby from the quarterdeck, and Dobby shrugged at Lily before he left,

“It’s only logic.”

And he was right. It was only logic, but for some reason this logic seemed off. Lily didn’t know yet how or why.

Before Lily could place her dishes in water, she was slammed to the mast. She felt her back pop in several places and howled.

“What the hell!” she shouted, looking up, only to stare into the eyes of her Captain. Potter was looking all sorts of furious; she could see the veins in his neck on the verge of popping.

“You lying son of a whore!” he roared, looking like he wanted to carve her up and feed her to the sharks.

While trying to push down her fear, Lily glared at him. She felt her eyes well up at the pain against her wishes. She respected Potter as a Captain, but this was taking it a step too far.

The crew had gathered around them quickly when discovering the commotion. Lily saw Winky shooting up from her seat, hands over her mouth in shock.

“What are you playing at, Potter?” she spat his last name out like filth, but he didn’t seem to be able to grow any angrier. Dobby shot forward, trying to pry the captain away from her, but the rest of the crew pulled him back.

“You told me you didn’t pick her up!” he shouted, his hands tightening on her shirt. Lily tried saying something, but her words seemed stuck to her throat. Her stuttering was drowned in the noise of the crowd. “So why is this snake,” he violently shoved a man standing beside him to the ground, “telling me you did?” She recognized the man, his name was Mikey, he taught her a knife trick while on board Malfoy’s ship. But alas, he had not recognized her.

“Lying to the Captain is breaking the code.” The voice of Sirius Black sounded darker than she had heard it before. His gaze when he broke from the crowd burned like liquid fire. They were all watching her, scrutinizing her, Lily felt like screaming.

“And breaking the code means…” he trailed off, Lily watched as Frank growled at the mere suggestion while she still didn’t understand, “death.” Lily flinched.

“Take off your hat,” -The Captain fished up a knife, lightly pressing the cold metal right under her chin- “so I can look into your eyes when I slit your throat.”

“Back off, Potter, or you’ll be dead before you can touch a hair on my head.” Without him noticing, Lily had managed to press a knife to his side. They were locked tight, the crew gasped, and Lily drew only the slightest amount of blood. Potter hissed but didn’t move an inch. Neither were ready to back down.

“Who are you, huh? One of Voldy’s?” Sirius asked, moving closer, probably to grab her knife.

“Stop it!”, her voice turned an octave higher, and Sirius froze, “I’ll kill him, I swear to you I will.”

“Don’t.” She turned to Winky sharply, who had just stepped into the ring. “Just tell him.”

“Shut it.” Lily growled; her eyes once again locked with Potter’s. She spotted a glimmer of confusion in his dark irises, but it was drowned by the anger.

“Tell him or I will!”

“Fine!” Lily spit, clenching and loosening her fist rhythmically. “But first you drop your weapon.” James watched her for a second, eyes jumping form back and forth over her face, but she already knew he was going to refuse.

“Lower yours.” The ocean breeze seemed to favor him, Lily thought, where it stroked his hair instead of slapping him in the face.

Lily scoffed, rolling her eyes at the mere suggestion. “Then you’ll just kill me.” she stated, pushing her dagger a bit further in a warning.

“Do I have a guarantee you won’t kill me?” His eyes were unflinching, but now maybe a bit softer, she couldn’t be certain.

“My word.” Lily lifted her chin proudly. Her word was something to trust… most of the time. She was lady after all, but Potter wouldn’t know that. He laughed mockingly. The sound was so forced it was painful to listen to.

“The word of a traitor.” His mouth curled in a snarl. His glare was toxic, she wanted to flinch, but she didn’t, she couldn’t.

“Lower your weapon, Potter.” She hissed through clenched teeth. The sun turned the sea to a ferocious red as they stood there without blinking, locked in a silent fight that could only end in death.

“She is Lily Evans.”

[ertrunkenerwassergeist]

Born Into the Wilds - Chapter 9

*slams hands on the table* This chapter is finally done! Sorry for the long wait, in compensation this is extra long. I'm prepared to get screamed at. Also a big thank you towards @noctanotherone for helping to get my thoughts in order on this one.

Here’s a Link to AO3.

In which a battle happens and General Glauca appears.

Featuring: the absence of Captain Drautos, confusing military stuff the author made up on the fly, Nyx' usual planlessnes, Crowe ex machina, lightning and awkward dialogue.

Warnings: blood, injuries, death (this is a battle)

Words in Hadnissa:

makti-oir = war chief, commander-in-chief, warlord; lit.: leading hunter Galahkari = people of Galahd Ohlro ar fahl Eohsas = Eos' light be on you; a formal greeting kohna = swearword; along the lines of shit ohtahi triantafe = a type of rose native to Galahd with black petals, it's highly poisonous and even the smell can cause hallucinations thuir = father makuwid = hunting group, squad mates zehstir = foreigner, enemy; very strong insult namakar = huntress; lit.: she-hunter

09. A Complication

The attack couldn't have happened at a more unfortunate time. Nyx had been back from his two week medical leave for a few days now and had been in the middle of planning the second set of training exercises for the newly structured Kingsglaive with Libertus and Luche.

It was still a right mess. The members of the Kingsglaive took to the change with an enthusiasm tinged with relief that had surprised Nyx. The troops he had interacted with regularly had been mostly stable, with the most extreme exception being Troop Rani.

Captain Drautos wasn't happy about any of this. He had stood at the edge of the training field at the first day of training, with a dark scowl on his face and hadn't said a word as everybody made their best attempt at working together within their new groupings. When the first exercises had resulted in people screaming at each other, Nyx had thought he had seen a gleam of grim satisfaction in the Captain's eyes. But that couldn't have been correct. Right?

In the end, it had taken Libertus yelling at them to behave like professional hunters, to calm everybody down. His best friend and hunting-brother may have a temper and grouch about things he didn't like in above average volume more often than not, it took quite a bit, however, to actually get him to yell on the top of his lungs – and what powerful lungs they were. Everybody knew that.

At the end of the day, those training exercises could have gone worse and no one had been permanently maimed or killed. That could definitely be considered a victory in some cases. Nyx could understand the hiccups, he really could. All members of the Glaive had found ways to work around the problems of each Unit and Troop over the years. Even Troop Rani with its two feuding members. And now they had to get used to new people hunting at their sides.

It was Pelna who burst through the door of the tiny office Nyx had commandeered, since he, to his utter consternation, actually needed one now, his face a grim mask that grabbed the attention of all in attendance at once.

“Border Patrol just sent the message: Niflheim is on the move again. They say Glauca was sighted with them. The King wants us out there as soon as possible.”

For half a second no one said anything. Nyx jumped up from where he had sat down not a minute ago, nearly knocked a pile of papers off the desk and cursed. Libertus' face looked caught halfway between a snarl and an expression as if he had just smelled something unpleasant, while Luche's face could have been made out of stone.

Nyx took a deep breath, suddenly deathly calm. The smell of ozone started to creep through the air. “Luche, get the others moving and call as many as you can out of their vacation. With Glauca there we need every hunter we can get. Pelna, make sure everybody gets what they need from the inventory and I don't care if some idiot says 'Crownsguard only'. Take it, I'll deal with it once we're back again. Libertus, round up the trucks and tell those damned drivers to be there on time or we'll drive ourselves. We can't let that son of a she-devil any further into Lucis. Also tell Sonitus to get in touch with the Border Patrol, I want to know exactly where the Niffs are. You all have an hour. I'll-”

“You'll get ready and calm down your magic, Nyx. If you fry the truck you're in because you can't control yourself, or worse, blow it up, you won't be getting anywhere,” stated Libertus rather forcefully.

For a moment they stared at each other, both willing the other to back down with their gazes alone. But his hunting-brother was right. He himself may be rather calm, but his magic was a torrent beneath his skin.

“All right,” he conceded. “All right.”

Libertus looked at him a moment longer to make sure he actually meant it, before he nodded and stormed out of the room after the others that had already left the moment they had received their orders.

An hour wasn't a lot of time to prepare, and they hadn't done any exercises for it – Nyx put them on his ever growing to-do list – but they really needed to hurry.

He stayed in the office a few minutes longer, minutes that felt like an eternity, until the animal-deep jungle-instinct raging beneath his skin was reduced to a distant echo thrumming in his mind. But instead of going towards the locker room to get ready, he left the tiny room to get to the Captain's office.

Nyx had tried to stay out of the older man's hair for the last few days as much as possible. But now, makti-oir or not, the Kingsglaive needed their Captain.

In the hallways it was like somebody had poked a beehive. People were everywhere, trying to do whatever they were doing as fast as possible without actually running in the halls. A crowd was assembling around the Glaive's armoury, voices clamouring over each other in a bit to get what they wanted, and fast. Through a gab Nyx could see Tredd trying to keep order with a grim face, and continued on his way. People should know better than to question Tredd within the armoury. The Furias may be traditionally artisans, but if Tredd understood one thing best, it was weapons.

“Captain?” Nyx half asked, half yelled as he knocked on the man's door.

No answer came.

Nyx frowned. Should he open the door anyway? He could feel the gazes of the passing Glaives in his back and decided he could deal with the consequences, should the Captain be in his office. Settling his shoulders and chin in a stubbornly determined expression, he opened to door with one last unanswered knock.

“Captain, I'm coming in.”

The office was empty.

Nyx closed the door behind him to keep curious gazes out and started to search the room for a clue to where Captain Drautos could be. There were no new messages or notes pinned to the walls, no file on the desk that could tell him anything, and he didn't quite dare to actually rummage through the cabinets or the desk.

With a displeased frown Nyx gaze wandered one last time around the relatively spacious room before he whirled around and left. He had better things to do right now than to look for the Captain.

There was a crowd forming outside the headquarters. People stopped and gawked as the Glaive assembled outside in their new groups, while non-fighting members loaded the trucks with field packs, half of which Pelna had managed to wrestle from the Crownsguard's clutches somehow.

Nyx ignored the Insomnians as best as he could and tried to decide how to divide the Troops into Companies. He hadn't had the time to really do that until now, which was coming back to bite him into the ass. He hissed like a disgruntled cat, displeased with himself and those damned onlookers. They had ten minutes left before wheels up and still more Glaives arrived, those having been called in from their vacation.

All in all, Nyx estimated that there were around 200 Glaives assembled, which was less than he liked and more than he had expected. Their numbers had been dwindling steadily for years now. They needed new recruits, but that was a problem for another time. Nothing he could do about it now.

He looked for Libertus. His hunting-brother had the loudest voice he knew and could probably make himself be heard over the noise the easiest. The man stood at the edge of the plaza where the noise wasn't as prevalent and talked into a clunky military phone with a fierce scowl on his face. He hung up before Nyx could reach him.

He gave a lazy salute in greeting and hung the phone that could probably be used as a murder weapon, onto his belt.

“Bad news: only half the usual drivers are there. The other half is 'indisposed' because the call was too short notice,” he sneered.

Nyx suppressed the urge to growl. “Then we won't ask for their services anymore,” he said.

“I have nothing against that,” Libertus shrugged. “We could probably hire a few Galahkari that could use the job, as soon as Crowe figures out our budget. But we need to somehow arrive at the battle before the Niffs stand in front of Insomnia.”

“We can do that,” agreed Nyx. It was a good idea. “Could you do me a favour, big guy?”

At once Libertus eyed him suspiciously. Nyx just rolled his eyes at his best friend's behaviour. He wasn't that bad.

“Hey, it's nothing bad. I just need you to help me with organizing the Troops and getting everybody into the trucks. Oh, and ask for volunteers to drive them.”

Libertus still looked sceptical but nodded and followed Nyx back in front of the crowd.

For a moment Libertus took in the group in front of him, all in the individualized uniforms of the Kingsglaive, and took a deep breath.

“Okay people, listen up!” he yelled so loudly Nyx was tempted to cover his left ear. “Into your Units and Troops! Don't fall asleep people! Troop leaders to the front!”

To Nyx' satisfaction, it didn't even take half a minute for the whole Kingsglaive to stand in front of him in orderly lines. There were eleven Troops in total, ranging from a total strength of ten to thirty-one people.

The two Troops specializing in stealth and hit-and-run tactics would be grouped into one Company, three Troops could be grouped under heavy hitters and assault, he supposed, and a further two fell under demolition. The last four were a bit trickier. One specialized in ranged fighting, one in magic, another was the supply squad and the last could be called a rearguard, he supposed. In the end the mages were stuck with the ranged fighters.

Under the curious eyes of the growing Insomnian crowd and camera flashes, they piled into the trucks as to Libertus' yelled instructions, and departed with only a ten minute delay. The streets were empty of any traffic as they made their way towards the wall and Nyx realized that somebody must have told the City Watch that they were coming through. He sent a quiet blessing to the person who had thought of doing so. Probably either Pelna or Sonitus.

Nyx had absolutely forgotten about it.

Their long convoy passed through the gate and over the huge bridge connecting Cavaugh with Leide without any interruption.

It was shortly after nightfall when they neared the latest known position of the Niflheimr army. They were very close to the Taelpar Crag now. Until now Niflheim had not managed to bridge it and take Duscae. They had gotten close more than once, though, and it showed in the many natural stone and crystalline arches spanning the Crag, that had been fortified or destroyed in the fighting.

Secullam Pass was chosen as their base of operations. Within minutes near blinding floodlights were set up to keep the daemons away, a watch was set up and Unit Kresch, under Sonitus, was sent out to stake out the enemy.

Waiting for a battle to begin had always been the worst for Nyx. It made him restless with pent up energy and broody. It reminded him too much of his time with the resistance in Galahd.

To keep himself from crawling up the rocky walls surrounding their camp, he hunted down Pelna, the newly baked leader of the Gebo Unit. It was a part of the Ulnen Troop which was responsible for their supplies. Right now they were responsible for keeping their floodlights running and distributing the field packs.

“Ohlro ar fahl Eohsas, makti-ori,” greeted Pelna when he saw Nyx coming and crossed his wrists in a formal greeting.

Nyx stared at him and very pointedly rose a hand to his collar bone. Pelna actually rolled his eyes at that, but didn't comment on it. Instead he stepped up to his friend and said: “How can I help you, Nyx?”

“I know it's kind of late to ask, but how did you manage to convince the Crownsguard to part with their stuff? The last time the Captain tried, I heard it nearly ended with somebody dead.”

Pelna stared at Nyx with a raised eyebrow as if to say and this is why you keep me from working? “It's pretty simple. I kept to the tried and true method of 'better ask for forgiveness than permission'. Don't look at me like that, I learned that from you, you know? Damn idiot that you are. I bribed Hephaistos into helping, and he was the distraction while I and some of my new Unit mates got the stuff out.”

It took Nyx a few seconds to actually understand what Pelna had just said, but when he did, he couldn't help himself. He laughed. It was a roaring full belly laugh that made more than one head turn, but Nyx didn't care. This was just too good. Pelna cast him a sour look.

“What's so funny?” asked Libertus as he marched towards them along with Crowe.

Nyx wheezed as he tried to get his laughter under control, only for it to start up again as he opened his mouth to explain.

“It would be so embarrassing, if you died of laughter and took us with you because you guided the Niffs towards our base,” stated Crowe in that typical deadpan of hers, when she found something hilarious but refused to laugh herself for whatever reason.

“I- I'm sorry,” Nyx gasped, fighting to keep the laughter down. He pressed a hand over his mouth. His eyes started to tear up with the effort it took.

“Our dearest First Hunter seems to find it hilarious how I got us the supplies we desperately need,” grumbled Pelna, and got a sage nod from Libertus and an amused huff from Crowe as an answer.

“Don't get me wrong, this is funny and all, but Luche is looking for you. He wants to go over the attack plan with the rest of the lead hunters. Which you should actually organize since it's your job, Nyx,” said Crowe.

“Alright, alright. I'm coming,” Nyx answered as soon as his breathing was steady enough and he didn't fear to burst into laughter again.

They attacked at daybreak. As soon as the sun was high enough in the sky to ward the daemons away. As far as they had been able to tell this was the time the Niffs were most vulnerable since they couldn't depend on their growing mass of daemons. Until now, when it had come to open battle, the Captain had always insisted to wait for the Niffs to attack and defend from a stronger position.

Nyx had decided to do something different.

Units Kresch and Roh, who now belonged to the Tahrolin Troop, and were their stealth specialists, were to circle around the enemy force with a demolition Unit and attack the pens where they kept the beasts they used as an attack force. Hours ago, Luche had taken Roh Unit and had gone to join Sonitus to give him his orders. Simultaneously the heavy hitters would stage a full on frontal attack along with Senehrin Company to give them cover fire.

As soon as Luche's voice came over the comms, reporting that they were in position, Nyx gave the order to march over the wide stone arch spanning Tealpar Crag. Not far behind it, on the other side, was a wall the Niffs had hastily erected, and span their whole compound. It was barely more than a few slaps of concrete stacked onto each other.

A slight breeze ruffled Nyx' hair before the world grew still. Not even the distant calls of the birds could be heard. There was only the warmth of the early morning light, the sound of his own breathing and the feeling of animal-deep jungle-instinct crackling close beneath his skin. A rumbling growl resonated through his chest as his field of vision widened and narrowed down at the same time. Only the wall and what lay behind it were important now. New colours joined the old and some grew muted as his eyes grew more sensitive to light.

Then the crudely erected wall exploded as a combination of old Galahdian seal traps and Lucian fire spells crashed into it.

Nyx stood close enough to feel the hot air lick across his skin. His lips twisted into a snarl that could have been a bloodthirsty smile, as the sound of screeching metal and yelling voices reached him over the roaring fire and falling rubble.

All nervousness was gone as anticipation curled in his gut, and sparks of lightning travelled up and down his arms.

As soon as the rubble had settled, Nyx bounded into the thick oily smoke churning in the air and blocking out the light. Formless shapes tumbled through the thick smoke, and all within the reach of his kukri fell in gurgling screams and burbling whimpers.

The smell of burning metal and rubber, oil and blood clogged his nose, but still he found his way to the other side of the burning hell. Nyx jumped onto the nearest MA Veles and toppled it with a volley of lightning until nothing but a smoking husk of useless metal was left.

A roar echoed between that walls of this area in the base, as he wedged his blades free of the machine he had driven them into. It travelled over the twisted metal and MT and MA units attempting to form a defensive line. It made the air quiver and the hairs on his neck raise in anticipation. It took him a moment to realize that it was him who made that sound. A challenge and announcement of an assured victory at the same time.

Nyx clamped his mouth shut behind his face guard and shook his head. He needed to keep a clear mind. A shot cracked through the air, missing Nyx, who was still crouching on top of the smoking MA Veles, by a hair. Only years of training suppressed his initial instinct to flinch. Instead he threw one kukri into he direction the shot had some from.

The world around him dissolved into a nauseating display of shards of Lucian magic and then he was on top of an MT. His chest slammed into its front and made him groan as the air was knocked out of him. Even through his clothes and armour he could feel the icy cold the MT emitted. The thing couldn't react fast enough and fell lifeless to the floor as Nyx rammed a blade into the masked forehead.

He now stood on a metal catwalk spanning the Niflheimr compound overhead. His new vantage point let him see the Glaives who were now pouring through the opening that had been blown into the wall. A large part of the magitek had blown up along with it. Their fault for storing their shit along the outer wall. Nyx snorted and watched for a moment as the Glaive practically descended upon everything that was still able to move.

Satisfied, he turned away and looked where still a series of explosions shook the air, along with the resounding roars and snarls of furious behemoths and sabertusks. He couldn't really see anything that was going on over the other walls between him and the other Units, but he trusted in their ability to get the job done.

Out of the corner of his eyes he saw movement. It was a pair of MT, both of them snipers, aiming at the Glaives below. They hadn't seen him until now. Within seconds he was on them, tackling the first as he aimed a shot and drove a kukri into the knee of the second, who toppled over, off the catwalk and into the fray below. Snarling and eyes blazing, he slammed his now empty hand against the MT's face and sent lightning through it until its mask was nothing more than a warped mass of metal and its limbs stopped twitching uncontrollably.

Again he looked towards the closest inner wall which prevented them from getting further into the strangely improvised base. He had an idea. But as he reached up to activate the communication device, he ripped it off his ear with a foul curse as it fried with a painful pop-spark.

Shit. So much for that, he thought with a twist of his lips. I really should have practised more.

Nyx warped down towards the kukri still lodged into the now dead MT's leg and grabbed the nearest Glaive by the shoulder. It was Axis.

“I need you to relay some orders for me!” he yelled over the cacophony of screeching metal, gun shots, the dying roar of a furious behemoth and the sounds of discharging magic, as people cried and fought and died.

Thankfully Axis didn't bother to ask what had happened to his device and just raised his hand.

“Attention, all Glaives. I'm about to relay orders of the makti-oir in his stead.”

“The most talented warpers are to gather near the wall leading further into the base. We need to get past the gate to prevent the Niffs from organizing a counter attack, so we'll warp over the wall and open it from the inside. Luche is to do the same on his end as soon as those damn behemoths are dead. Oresch Unit is to secure the breached wall as soon as we're finished here.”

Nyx took a deep breath. His magic was pressing against his mind, urging him to hunt, to kill and feast on his prey. Another breath. Not now. Pack came first. Their safety was paramount, and to keep them safe he needed to be able to think.

Dutifully, Axis repeated every word.

With a thankful nod Nyx turned away and made his way towards the targeted wall. It wasn't very high, five metres at most, which was below average for a Niff base, but like in all bases, this one had an opening which was blocked by a series of red lasers that could melt flesh from bones, if someone was stupid enough to touch it.

Axis followed him. The man may specialize in magic based close combat, but his warping skills were above average. Not far from him, Nyx could see Libertus decapitate a MT with a kukri that looked more like a traditional Ostium battle axe than anything else.

Three others met them by the wall. Nyx grinned. Five. Five people for this was a good omen.

“Axis, you're to concentrate on shutting down those lasers, the rest of us will cover your ass. On my mark, we warp. Ready- go!”

In unison they threw their blades. Lucian magic burned like acid on Nyx' tongue as he appeared above the wall for a second before he warped down on the other side, the others following him in a protective formation around Axis in which Nyx was taking point.

His feet barely touched the ground, before he was swarmed by MT. They were those guys with the heavy serrated swords. Nyx cursed and dove out of the way. A sword whizzed past where his head had been not a second ago. Nyx managed to kick the thing in the hip as he evaded another horizontal swing of the sword. The kick caused the upper body of the MT to rotate just enough that it buried its blade into the machine next to it, caving its breastplate in with a high pitched metallic shriek and a sickening crunch.

Before his target could wedge its blade free, he severed the sword arm at the elbow and drove the other blade into its neck. His weight caused it to fall backwards and take another two MT with it. He made short work of them.

“I've got it!” cried Axis and with a hiss the lasers deactivated.

Suddenly the air was filled with the electric whirr of MA units activating. There were eight of them. Kohna. So they hadn't been fast enough.

With a snarl Nyx hurled himself over the last two MT in front of him, twisting the right one's neck and clipping the other in the shoulder. He knew his blades couldn't do much against the MA units, so he sheathed one and used his now free hand to fry the nearest one with a powerful bolt of lightning.

Not far from him Axis was doing something similar, attacking a machine's weak spots with calculated shots of lightning. They needed more mages here. Again Nyx cursed himself for frying his comm. He couldn't distract the other four with him now, so he had no other choice but to retreat.

And nearly run into another Glaive right as he stepped through the gate. Blinking sweat from his eyes, he recognized Libertus. His facecloth had slipped off and revealed a bloody nose.

“Libs! I need you to comm Lesan Unit! Our blades won't do anything against those MA units!”

Without further ado, the man did just that. His voice was drowned out as something further into the base crumbled with a deafening blast. The ground shook.

It was only due to the fact that Nyx stood so close to the wall, that he didn't fall. Libertus didn't fare as well. He fell heavily onto his side and had to quickly roll away as a magitek spear buried itself into the ground where he had just lain. Nyx killed the thing with another blast of lightning.

“Come on, big guy. No time for a nap,” he said as he helped his hunting-brother to stand back up.

The fighting continued in that vein, until they met Luche's Troop in the heart of the base. It was here the officers were housed as well as logistics and communication. Or there should have been.

Instead there was nothing here but a large empty space.

Something was very, very wrong.

He could see the same thought echoed back at him from Luche's face. The man had discarded his hood and facecloth sometime during the fight. His normally slicked back blond hair hung into his forehead and was covered in soot and ash. Other than a few scrapes and a nasty bruise forming over his cheek bone, he seemed to be fine.

The sun beat down upon them, signalling the nearing midday. The air was hot and sticky and stank of ozone and molten metal and rubber. It left an oily film at the back of his throat with each breath Nyx took and made him wish he hadn't already used up all of his meagre water rations.

His muscles ached from the continued fighting and he could feel a stasis nearing. He had simply used up too much of his magic. He couldn't bring himself to regret it, however, as it had saved more than one life.

“Keep your eyes peeled,” he ordered. “This stinks of a trap.”

Next to him Libertus shifted his weight in anxiousness. “I've got a bad feeling about this,” he muttered just loud enough for Nyx to hear.

Suddenly Luche raised a hand and the growing mutterings between the Glaives stopped at once. He activated his comm, clearly listening to something. The longer he did so the paler his already fair complexion grew and a raw look of fear flittered through his eyes. It made Nyx' stomach plummet in dread. Luche looked him in the eye and suddenly Nyx knew.

Glauca.

Ruthlessly, Nyx shoved down the urge to order a full retreat. It had never been stated directly during the planning of this attack, but they would take this chance to kill the monster in the armour, one of the main reasons they had had to flee Galahd seven years ago.

With a resolute nod towards Luche, Nyx opened his mouth to issue new orders, but was interrupted by the sudden cry of “Dropships incoming!”.

“So this really is a trap,” someone behind him mumbled, despair lining the voice.

Nyx gritted his teeth. He knew the sensible thing to do was to order a retreat. At once. Before the trap napped shut.

“Libs, contact Crowe.”

“What? Nyx, we need to fucking go, right now!” his best friend hissed into his ear.

“No!” Nyx half yelled, half growled.

He refused. He refused to let Glauca slip through his fingers again. That man had collapsed the tunnels he, his sister and his mahir had been in, killing the last of his immediate family. He bared his teeth in a snarl.

All eyes were on him.

The high pitched whine of the air ships' engine ground against his sensitive ears.

“Contact Crowe,” he repeated, his voice a harsh rasp. “Ask her if she and her Unit managed to master that storm field spell they have been practising.”

Realization crossed Libertus' face like a ray of sunlight in a dark, cloudy sky and the tense atmosphere eased the tiniest bit.

“This plan is madness,” growled Luche as he came closer.

“I won't let Glauca slip through my fingers this time, if I don't have to, Luche,” Nyx growled back.

The blond man stared at him with hard eyes. Exhaustion was edged into his face, a testament to the overall state of the Glaives present. Damn it, he shouldn't have let all of their main attack force fight from the beginning. It must have been hours now that they had fought without much of a break, safe for a few moments they had been able to steal here and there.

MT didn't grow tired. Humans did.

“She says yes,” interrupted Libertus before Luche could respond.

“Good. Tell her to blast as many ships out of the sky as she can. Units Arl and Sevah, trap this place to Pitioss and back. Those tin cans aren't to take a single step without something going off. The rest of you, regain as much strength as you can before one of the ships make it through. Share any elixirs you might still have left over. I'll go after Glauca.”

“Have the ohtahi triantafe finally cooked your brain? This is madness, Nyx. No one has gone up against that man in a direct confrontation and lived,” Libertus practically yelled.

“Libertus is right. They say not even the Royal House dared to do it, back when Regis still deigned to leave Insomnia,” Luche cut in.

“I won't go alone,” defended Nyx.

“Oh, and who exactly will help you? Our strongest fighters will be here because of your hair brained scheme,” his hunting-brother growled.

“Oresch Unit,” answered Nyx before he could stop to think about what he was doing. “They are by the breached wall. Luche, where is Glauca now?”

Luche was clearly unwilling to answer, but after a few seconds he sighed. “Fine, you win. The Fathers must have blessed you, for your stupid ideas to work so often. He was seen outside the base, close to the Crag and to the north. Don't lose, Nyx. If you do, the whole Glaive is done for.”

Nyx nodded, eyes flashing in a silent promise, and ran out of the base as fast as he could, as the sky darkened with roiling clouds and lightning flashed.

Oresch Unit had not been idle during the fighting. Nyx' experienced eye could see the signs of traps half hidden in the rubble. Discreet lines were drawn into the dust and dirt, and he wondered who had sacrificed their water to make these. Most of them were old Galahdian scourge wardings that had been modified to work against Niflheimr magitek. Their presence read dangerously close to that of a daemon.

Their leader was a petite woman with shoulder length dark, brown hair that, at the right side of her head, was braided close to her head in a series of small braids forming a wave pattern. Her name was Ladone Najad, Tethys' aunt, and was approaching her fiftieth year. She had somehow mastered the art of startling even a behemoth with her presence alone, if she so desired, or she could make herself be completely overlooked.

That was exactly what he needed in this situation. Should he not be able to do it, she could use her talent to catch Glauca unawares and kill him.

Probably.

Hopefully.

Ladone listened to his plan with the gravitas of a person who had seen it all. She didn't say a word until he had ended and looked at her expectantly. One of her thin eyebrows rose the tiniest bit, as she thoughtfully chewed on one of those fireleaves she carried around everywhere.

“You're worse than your thuir ever was,” she drawled and spit a reddish blob onto the ground. “My ancestors and the serpents in the water help me, I'll do it. But I want my makuwid to stay here, makti-oir. I won't let this wall be undefended should something happen, and if I've learned one thing with those zehstiris, it's that there's always something going on with them. I'll follow you, to death, if need be, but be aware that, if I get the chance, I'll take it. This isn't your kill alone.”

Her eyes were piercing and hard as flintstone as she looked at him. He nodded respectfully. Ladone Najad wasn't somebody he wanted mad at him. Ever.

“Of course, namakar,” he answered.

“Good. Then we shouldn't waste any more time. Iase, you're in charge until I get back,” she barked.

A woman in her late thirties and hair cut so short it was nothing more than fuzz on her head, gave a salute. Ladone nodded and turned her attention back towards Nyx.

“Before I forget, here.” She threw a flask at him. It contained a yellowish liquid flecked with blue. “My son-in-law made this. It's better than the dishwater the Lucians try to sell us as an ether. Take it. You look like shit.”

Nyx' only answer was a tired glare, but he emptied the small flask without another word. It tasted kind of like he imagined a swamp to taste like. The thick liquid travelled down into his stomach, leaving a warm and revitalizing trail in its wake. At the very least it worked gentler than the punch in the gut that was a Lucian ether.

“Well?” she said, her head cocked in a way that clearly communicated they should go now.

Without another word Nyx started walking north. They stepped into the shadows of the trees growing close to the edge of Tealpar Crag, and from one moment to the next Ladone seemed to vanish into thin air. Nyx breathed an exasperated huff that just covered how anxious he really was.

Around him nature was unnaturally still. The animals had probably all fled when the fighting had begun this morning. Storm clouds swallowed nearly all of the daylight and lightning shrieked in the sky as it hit a dropship. The combined magic of nine mages weaving the field spell, was a growing weight prickling against his senses. Wind howled through the trees and across naked rock. It reminded him uncomfortably of the first hints of a Galahdian autumn storm.

He snarled to chase away the dread pooling in his gut, making his hands slippery with sweat and his senses going haywire at the sensation of being watched. Which he was. By Ladone. An alley, he reminded himself firmly and stepped out of the thinning trees and into the open. The ground was bare rock with a few stubborn bushels of grass growing here and there, and behind him the enemy base loomed, smoking and wreathed in lightning.

Suddenly, there he was.

General Glauca.

He emerged from the shadows of an erratic boulder like he was a daemon himself.

Each step the mountain of a man took sounded with a dull thud over the lighting roaring in the sky, his very presence filled the air with dread. Nyx crouched down, muscles suddenly too tense as his instincts screamed at him to run, and bared his teeth in a warning snarl.

“Your attack on the base was surprisingly effective, Glaive. You have my compliments,” Glauca snarled in a warped voice that set Nyx' teeth on edge and made his hair stand on end. The decidedly mocking tone didn't make it any better. “But now you are exactly where I want you to be.”

Nyx crouched even lower, nearly on all fours now. The handles of his kukri dug into his palms and he readjusted his grip.

A bone-grinding laugh travelled through the air and suddenly Nyx realized that this... person in front of him couldn't be human. It radiated an energy uncomfortably close to a powerful daemon and through the crevices and seams of the armour shone a dark light that betrayed its true nature. That of absolute malice for malices sake.

Unbidden, an old adage of protection and warding tumbled from his lips.

Another unholy laugh.

“You think this will help you, little Glaive? Words for beings that are nothing more than hot air themselves? Let me tell you one thing: there are no Gods. There are only those strong enough to lord their power over those too weak to do anything about it.”

“I'm not interested in what you have to say, zehstir,” Nyx hissed.

His field of vision widened, and he could now hear the near silent whirr Glauca's armour emitted as he dragged the tip of his huge sword in an arch across the dirt in a mock salute.

“Ah, how long has it been since somebody called me that?” Glauca drawled each word, rolling them around his tongue as if they were a fine wine. “That name brings back memories.”

With a roar of sudden fury, Nyx threw the kukri in his right hand and pounced.

The warp was quick and instinctive. For a split second, he saw nothing but magical particles glowing a near blinding blue. His fingers closed around the grip of his kukri without hesitation as he twisted in the air to strike his prey where his neck met the shoulder.

An ice cold hand clamped around his wrist in an iron grip and tossed him away. Nyx rolled across the dirt, using the momentum to twist into a crouching position again. His breath came in quick bursts and his lungs burned. Damn it. He was too tired for this fight. It had made him a second too slow.

“How pathetic. I expected more of a challenge from an esteemed warrior like you,” mocked the thing masquerading as human.

Thundering steps drew slowly nearer, but this time Nyx wouldn't let himself be goaded into attacking too early.

He stayed still.

Waited.

Magic, free and wild and powerful like the coeurls of his home, thrummed beneath his skin, giving his tiring muscles the opportunity to react fast enough.

Glauca's blade rose and Nyx darted beneath his arm and behind him. He jumped onto the General's back as the man took a jerky step forward, his blade cutting nothing but air where he had without a doubt expected Nyx' head to be.

This tiny mistake gave him enough time to find a grip on the armour as he slammed one of his kukri into the left shoulder guard. Lightning shrieked, bright and deafening, as it travelled from his hand into the blade and then into the magitek armour.

Glauca roared. More in fury than in pain, but it was still loud enough to make Nyx' ears ring and his vision blur. The inhuman sound sent goosebumps up and down his spine.

The armour started to glow as too much energy travelled through it and began to melt away. With a triumphant growl, Nyx challenged even more lightning. Slowly, oh so slowly, he could feel the armour give away. But it wasn't fast enough.

His prey started to struggle, trying to get him off.

In response Nyx slung one arm around the helmet and watched as it started to light up as it was assaulted by bolts of lightning. With another roar of fury his prey stumble backwards. One step. Then another. Farther and farther until Nyx' back hit the erratic boulder. Hard.

Dark spots danced across his vision and the air was pressed out of his lungs. His grip slacked and the lightning stopped as his concentration broke.

Something hit him hard in the face. He could taste blood on his tongue and blinding pain exploded behind his eyes as the back of his head collided with the boulder at his back. Again he was thrown through the air. Only this time he landed painfully on his side.

He lay there as he struggled to pull air back into his lungs. Only luck had allowed him to not lose his grip on both kukri. Shit, he hoped he hadn't broken any ribs.

Harsh laboured breaths echoed mechanically through the magically charged air. It stank nauseatingly of ozone, hot metal and something putrid that made Nyx retch.

“Do you... really think that... something like this... will kill me, Glaive?”

I hoped it would, Nyx wanted to say but couldn't, too busy with just breathing and dragging himself up onto his feet again. He couldn't allow himself to stay down. To stay down was to die. And he couldn't die now when things were finally changing.

Finally he managed to clear his swimming vision enough to be able to focus on Glauca again. The monster in human skin still stood by the bolder. He did not quite lean on it, but it was clear that the melted armour on his shoulder was giving him trouble. The destroyed parts on his helmet were already regenerating, giving Nyx only the most fleeting of glances at a patch of pale skin at the temple.

He cursed quietly inside. He had nearly had him.

His limbs trembled as he forced himself to stand upright. Stasis was looming dangerously close. He had put nearly all of his newly regained magical strength into that attack.

Movement on top of the boulder caught his eye. Barely a moment later Glauca howled. Still eerie and hair raising and mechanical. But this time in pain as a long and thin kukri found the weakest spot of his destroyed shoulder guard.

Ladone twisted  the blade with a thundering war cry before ripping it out again. She was gone again within the blink of an eye. As if she had never been there in the first place.

A sword slammed into the boulder and nearly cut it in half.

“I will make sure there is nothing left of both of you to bury once I'm finished with you,” hissed Glauca through clenched teeth.

Nyx barked a laugh. An idea started to take form in his mind. It was madness, but it could work. He hoped Ladone would catch onto it. Otherwise he was pretty much dead.

“For that you need to catch me first,” he rasped with sharp grin full of teeth and retreated back the way he had come between the trees.

As he had hoped Glauca followed him, each step a tiny earthquake.

Wood splintered as his huge blade hit the trees Nyx duck behind, just dancing behind its reach like a cat playing keep-away.

A gust of wind that shouldn't have been. Metal rang against metal as Ladone struck again and vanished just as quickly as she had before. As Glauca made to follow her Nyx charged in a half hearted attack that missed its mark by an embarrassingly huge margin, to keep the man's attention focused on him.

Further and further Nyx lured Glauca between the trees. Closer and closer to the edge of the Crag. To an arch close to the one the Glaive had used to cross it, but still far enough away from the others. Hopefully.

Nyx' movements started to get sluggish. The burning in his lungs had exceeded uncomfortable and passed into painful a while ago. Each new breath he took was a struggle between his need for oxygen, to just keep moving a little further – nearly there, nearly there nearlytherenearlythere – and the instinctive need to avoid the pain it caused to suck in each new gulp of air.

His concentration had shifted from avoiding the sword chasing him to just keep moving. He knew, if he stopped, it would be over.

Suddenly the trees were gone and the Crag gaped at his back, beckoning the unwary to a horrifying death. A death Glauca had a scheduled meeting with, if Nyx had anything to say about it.

Oh so carefully he started to inch his way over the arch, concentrating only on Glauca and what his prey was doing. His steps had grown uneven and his left arm hung uselessly by his side. There were obvious chinks in his armour now. Nyx grinned a bloody grin. Ladone had gotten the bastard good.

Voices sounded from his left and behind him, but he ignored them in favour of Glauca. They were so close. So close to killing the second nightmare of Galahd.

Suddenly the man stopped right at the edgy of the arch. Nyx tensed.

“Do you think this cheap trick will work on me?”

Too late Nyx realized what Glauca meant. He flung himself forward in a futile attempt to stop it, but he knew he wouldn't be fast enough. Exhaustion ate away at him, both magical and physical.

A dark shadow slammed into Glauca's back with a defiant cry as the sword was driven into the arch, crumbling it with a nauseating wave of something that was neither magic nor scourge.

Nyx stumbled. One step, then another.

Then the ground beneath him fell away.

[saltandburnsis]

The Storm

Characters: Reader, Dean, Sam, Castiel (mentioned,) Crowley (mentioned)

Age: Any

Warnings: None Word Count: 1487 Summary: After a tornado warning leaves them stranded in the bunker, the youngest Winchester finds a way to get her brothers to take hold of the opportunity and relax. A/N: This takes place a couple months after they’ve found the bunker. Prompt from SPN Angst Bingo.

Your room’s dim lighting was suddenly replaced with flashing red as a blaring alarm you’d never heard began to echo through the halls of the bunker. You jumped out of bed and ran down to the study. Your brothers were already there and, by the stack of books on one side of the table, it looked like Sam had been there awhile.

“What’s going on? Are we under attack?” You asked once you were close enough to be heard over the alarm. Sam shook his head.

“No, no. This is different. I don’t-” He was cut off by another, shriller alarm coming from each of your phones’ speakers. You pulled your phone out of your pocket and looked down at the notification on the screen.

Emergency Alert

Tornado Warning in this area. Take shelter. Check local media. -NWS

“A tornado. Great,” Dean scoffed. “Sam, see if you can find a way to shut this alarm off. Y/N, check our supply stock in case we’re in it for the long haul. I’ll go check the news.”

The three of you parted ways at the eldest’s instructions, off to complete your given tasks. You went straight into the kitchen, trying to remember the last time any of you had been on a supply run. As long as you had a decent amount of basics—water, bread, peanut butter, beer—you’d be fine for a while. As you were halfway through making note of the contents of the pantry and were finished with the fridge, the lights in the room took on their normal hue and the alarm cut out. Thank God for Sam. He walked into the kitchen a few minutes later and took a seat at the table. Dean followed suit shortly after.

“How are we doing?” He asked, taking a seat across from Sam.

“We’re not stocked by any means, but we’ll make it about three or four days if we’re stuck long.” You sat down beside Sam.

“Generator is up and ready for use if we lose power,” Sam added.

“Good, good. ‘Cause we’re stuck here for at least 24 hours. Tornadoes touching down left and right,” Dean told the two of you.

“Should we be worried?” You asked, looking between the two of them.

“No. If anything, we can use it as an excuse to take a break from everything. Rest,” Sam replied, the relief clear in his voice. You had to admit, there was an appeal to relaxing. Hunts had been taking more and more out of you. It would be nice to rest. Still—

“What if something happens, though?” You spoke up again.

“We’re fine down here. As long as we all avoid a trip to Munchkinland, we’ll count this as a win,” Dean replied, standing from his seat. He walked over to the fridge. “How we doing on beer?”

“Enough to hold us over,” you answered,

While Dean began to raid the fridge, his comment got you thinking. Who would be who in the Winchester Wizard of Oz? Cas might be the scarecrow; between his lack of knowledge in certain crucial areas—ie., movie trivia—and the fact that it definitely wouldn’t be one of your brother’s in need of a brain, you figured that would be the best fit. Crowley could be the Tin Man, you figured. Mainly because you couldn’t call either of your brothers heartless, but also because being King of Hell brought with it certain connotations—one big one being ���heartless.”

You saw yourself as most like the Cowardly Lion: in need of some courage. Not that you weren’t brave, of course. You just felt as though you could use a bit more courage. Your brothers certainly didn’t, most recently evidenced by their calm demeanors during this event. While you focused on what could potentially go wrong, they were focused on what they could control now: checking food supplies, getting the alarm off, checking the news. All actions that helped you in surviving the present and plan for the future. You, on the other hand, panicked at the possibility that something could possibly happen to someone, ignoring the fact that everyone was fine. Definitely the Cowardly Lion. Your brothers both had a connection to Dorothy, of course—you all did: a desire to get out of the world you were thrown into and go to a normal life, go home.

You finally settled on Dean as the Wizard, based on all the inventions he’d come up with that made hunting easier and how often he reminded all of you that you didn’t need someone to give you what you needed. Cas knew more about the universe than all three of you could ever hope to. Crowley had his moments where he showed how big his heart could be, when he went against his nature. You had courage enough to face the supernatural constantly. And you were all home whenever the three of you together. Your home wasn’t four walls and a roof. It was your family.

That left Sam as Dorothy, and the idea of your older brother in a blue-checkered dress with red ruby slippers and his hair in braided pigtails sent you into a fit of laughter. Sam and Dean looked at each other quizzically, shrugged, then looked to you.

“Y/N? Everything alright?” Sam asked. Five minutes in, and you were already going stir crazy.

“Hmm? Oh, yeah. Everything’s great,” you replied. With another shrug, your brothers dropped the subject.

“Well, I don’t know about you two, but I’m going to use this time to recalibrate the weapons.” Dean took a swig of his beer and left the room.

“I’m going to try to finish that book I was reading. I’ll be in my room,” Sam stated, standing from the table. “Let me know if there are any updates?” You nodded, and he departed the room. You pursed your lips. Sure there were plenty of things you could catch up on during this weather-mandated time out from your day job, but you didn’t want to. As far as you were concerned, this was an opportunity to have some time with your brothers without that something big looming over your heads. This was your chance to just relax together.

Determined to see your vision through, you made your way into the living area. You surveyed the area and sighed. This was going to be a lot of work.

Two hours later

You began to put the finishing touches on the inside of the fort, finding the perfect pillow placement to suit everyone. It was silent in the space, allowing you to keep your project a secret while you worked. The silence also meant that you were easily able to hear the sound of two pairs of feet thudding down the hallway, quickly approaching your location. You quickly popped up from inside the fort and prepared for your brothers’ arrival.

As they entered the room, both men stopped short, looks of confusion quickly spreading across their faces.

“Y/N? What’s all this?” Sam questioned.

“We don’t get breaks like this often, so I thought we should take advantage of it. We can research and calibrate the weapons any time, but when do we get the chance to just sit down and hang out together outside of the car without the weight of the world on our shoulders? I’ve got a bunch of movies queued up, something for everyone, and I found a bunch of popcorn when I was checking the rations, so...movie night?” Sam and Dean looked at each other for a moment then turned and went into the kitchen. You pursed your lips and looked at the fort, believing all your hard work had gone to waste. However, a few minutes later, the smell of popcorn preceded your brothers’ arrival. Sam led Dean in, the former carrying a large bowl of popcorn and the latter an armful of drinks.

“What’s up first?” Dean asked as they entered the room and he made his way to your fort. You smiled and went to the TV, grabbing some old VHS’s the three of you kept around since childhood.

“I’ve got Lord of the Rings, Godzilla v. Mothra, and Jaws, but there’s more in the cabinet,” you replied. After much deliberation (and a decent amount of popcorn thrown around,) the three of you decided on Godzilla v. Mothra first. You settled into a spot underneath one of the warmer blankets, grabbed a drink and a handful of popcorn, and relaxed.

The storm ended only a few hours after it began, but the three of you were none the wiser as you continued on with your movie night, hidden away from the rest of the world. One by one, you fell asleep beside each other, the ominous piano chords of Jaws lulling you to sleep. The next morning you’d be thrown back into reality, but you were happy remaining in the present, avoiding thoughts about the future. Forever Taglist: @eternal-elir @choosemyname @mersuperwholocked-lowlife @not-astounding @sassy-specter want to be on my tag list? shoot me a message here

[tarralin]

Whirlwind

SFW ((Word count: 3496))

A/N: This is almost a month late but here we go! A few of us were greatly inspired by this glorious creation by the amazing @pastel-hideout (thank you for doing the Lord's work👏👏) when fangirling led to brainstorming which led to this smut-off challenge issued by @darkmindsthinktwistedthoughts and @xathia-89 with a few others of us joining in. Part 2 will be hosted over on @spicytarralin at a later time

Sir by @darkmindsthinktwistedthoughts

Yes, Professor by @jennacat84

A Towel is Optional by @xathia-89

~☆~

She should have been home hours ago yet here she was burning the midnight oil on a Tuesday after both of her teammates packed up their desks with no prior notice, leaving her to thread together the monthly financial reports alone. Truthfully, it really could have waited until tomorrow-- or even Thursday-- but working so close to the wire always filled her with dread and stole her sleep anyway.

A few too many power surges during video game marathons as a kid had drilled home a habit of frequent saves and a need to hoard duplicate reports like a dragon collecting its treasure. Habits she was eternally grateful for in times like this as they enabled her transform the seemingly mountain-sized workload into a manageable molehill.

Aaaaannnnnddddd I'm done!

A perk to being the only soul in the office was no one around to witness the unladylike victory dance as she pranced barefoot to the printer or her horrible rendition of a Broadway musical number with the innocent corporate report portfolio as her prop. Until lively clapping sounded immediately behind her, startling her to the point of knocking her off balance from the grand battement she was performing and sending her promptly to the floor.

A chuckle rumbled from the white-haired culprit as he extended a hand to help her up. “I was unaware we had a little mouse scurrying about during the nights and giving free entertainment.”

Her ears burned from being caught as a cold sweat ran down her back at the embarrassment. She accepted his hand to right herself and inspect the portfolio's contents before correcting him. “Only tonight. I'm not in the habit of pushing things off to the last minute… and I thought I was alone.”

“You were until a few moments ago,” another chuckle as his gaze latched onto the reports in her grasp. “I was just informed two of my lead accountants left the company without warning this afternoon and abandoned their work. I just came to take care of it myself but it looks like I was beaten to the draw. It's reassuring to know there are reliable individuals here who will rise when others fall. Let me take those off your hands.”

He reached for the folder only to be denied when she pulled it back out of reach. “I'm also not in the habit of releasing sensitive documents to just anyone who claims to be a boss. Especially when I, personally, have never seen his face. I apologize for any offense but I'll drop them off at the office myself, thanks.”

The casual smirk faded as surprise flashed through in his golden eyes before his grin returned, outstretched hand sweeping the room in an open gesture for her to lead the way.

Emboldened by his quick acceptance, she trotted away toward the elevators--

“Ahem…”

--until his voice stopped her and she watched the man bending to retrieve her heels from the floor. “Don't you need these?”

I'm going to have potato chips for ears before the night over if I keep this up. She managed to avoid eye contact as she slipped back into the death traps of fashion but caught sight of a growing grin as he waited patiently.

“I've never actually been to the executive floor before.” The typical droning elevator music had been cut at the end of business hours, plunging the ride to the top floor in the eerie silence she hated and felt a need to fill the void. “So this is a bit of an adventure.”

“Nothing too grand, I assure you. Just a few conference rooms and the private offices of the department heads.”

She shrugged at that. “Still a first and-- whoa!”

The entire floor appeared encased in sparkling crystal in the moonlight. Frosted and etched glass separated each room and office instead of plaster and drywall, giving an illusion to privacy. Dimmed lights along the wall base lit the floor path to the center hub where a circular receptionist desk sat like the heart of communication it probably was to the handful of walkways.

And he said ‘nothing too grand’.

“I have a strict open door policy.”

“ ‘Open door’? There are no doors at all to open.” Her eyes scanned the area for where the portfolio was supposed to go until they landed on a silver box to her left similar to a post office mail drop. As she approached it, an engraved plate denoted it as the ‘after hours’ report drop.

“Feel better?” The gentleman questioned with a raised eyebrow and the same smirk from earlier after her bundle landed inside the box with a distinctive thunk.

“Yes, I can now sleep soundly without it looming over my head.” She answered firmly, turning back down the short hall. She only made it a few steps before the jingle of keys sounded throughout the floor. She turned just in time to witness the man unlocking the box as if he had a thousand times, tucking the portfolio under his arm like a morning newspaper.

Yup, my ears are definitely burning to crisps.

She tried to evade him but the elevator just wouldn't move fast enough and he stepped onto the platform right as the doors closed behind him. She didn't dare say a word, thinking back to earlier and worried about how long he had watched her gather the reports together. She was so sure she had been alone until he appeared out of nowhere like a ghost.

I'll probably be fired in the morning.

The landing bell signaled the end of the line and they both exited into the parking garage, waving to the security guard before he caught her attention by holding up the folder. “I assume you'll be available for questioning should I require any clarifications?”

“Actually, after that performance, I planned to live under a rock for the rest of my life.”

“Depriving the world of such a delight? And people call me a tease.”

She shook her head with an eye roll, fighting against the fresh wave of embarrassment that threatened to singe her ears and cheeks again. She never had trouble remaining professional at work before, why was it so hard now and especially in front of this man? She needed to wrap things up and be on her way before she made a fool of herself any more than she already had.

She turned to him once reaching her car. “It was an honor and a pleasure meeting you, but now I have a suitable rock to hunt down and so I bid you goodnight.” There. That was mostly professional, right?

“The honor was all mine,” he extended his hand casually for a parting shake. She hesitated when she caught a glimpse of mischief sparkling in those golden eyes but shook off the feeling and accepted his hand firmly. Of course, it was a trap. Instead of releasing her after the appropriate time, he turned her hand in his and brought her knuckles to his lips. “As was the pleasure.”

That promptly turned her brains to mush incapable of words. With only a nod, she retrieved her hand and loaded in her car to finally make her way home.

~~~

Instead of being fired the next morning, Mitsuhide Akechi himself walked the finance floor until finding her desk to hand her a crate loaded with binders of financial reports for the last two years.

“I have some concerns but can't locate exactly what's wrong. I've already distributed your usual work to others as this will be your priority for the next week. You'll report directly to me only and the conference room at the end of the hall is yours for the time being as well.” Like a whirlwind, he was gone again, seemingly oblivious to the excited chatter following the shocked silence he rendered across the floor with his mere presence.

Even with such vague instructions, it didn't take long for her to find his ‘concerns’. The reports before her spelled out a textbook case of money laundering. However, the culprits were good at covering the tracks and distinguishing the pseudo-businesses from the legitimates would be the most time-consuming. But not impossible. All she had to do was find the patterns within the numbers…

It didn't take the whole week. By lunchtime on day three, she had her final report ready with her findings. Even with the evidence in hand, it was hard for her to believe that she had been working alongside the culprits for so long. No wonder they up and left all of a sudden, they must have known their thievery had been found out.

But why didn't Akechi seem surprised?

After presenting the information, he only smirked up at her as usual. “You even tracked down the ‘business’ owners. Impressive.”

When you say it like that… “Y-you already knew?”

A sigh as he righted the report in front of him into place. “I've known of those two's illegal activities since before they began.”

“Then why didn't you stop them?”

“ ‘Never interrupt your enemy when they're making a mistake’, plus it was quite entertaining to watch their poor attempts for a little while.”

“ ‘Entertaining’?! Who on Earth would just sit back and watch while people steal from their company? And what was the point of having me investigate it if you already knew?”

“Because, my little mouse, if you brought me the correct names it meant you played no part in the scheme.”

Ice flashed through her veins. “What's that supposed to mean?”

He stood at that, circling his desk to loom over her. The gaze he leveled her way froze her feet in place and, for a moment, she really did feel like a mouse caught in a predator's trap. “You didn't really think there was no backup plan, did you?”

Only sheer will kept her from trembling as realization struck. Just a few weeks ago, her identity protection plan had notified her of suspicious activity but assured her they had it taken care of. “They… they tried to pin it on me.”

“Indeed, luckily it appears you made some smart choices. And of course, I happen to be a little more than the average businessman.”

And here I called Dad paranoid for buying me that protection...

“Also,” his voice switching back to business mode as he paced back to his chair drew her from her panic. “Your thorough investigation shows you capable of filling one of the empty lead positions.”

“You're promoting me?”

He blinked up in genuine surprise. “You have an objection?”

“No!” She recovered. “It's just… a lot to take in and definitely not the direction I thought things would take.”

“Oh?” He grinned with genuine interest. “What direction was that?”

"A few days ago I thought I was fired!"

A chuckle while he sipped at a coffee mug. "I'll email you a briefing on your new duties and you can visit HR once you've moved into your new office."

"Thank you!" She turned excitedly on her heels to begin her new journey.

~~~

Akechi became a familiar face on the finance floor after her promotion, claiming an interest in overseeing her transition and supplemental training himself. Though it seemed he had more of an interest in seeing how far he could push her past her limits. For weeks, each visit rendered her with a heightened pulse as his words always held a double meaning that never failed to pull very not safe for work images to mind. He never touched. Nor pushed further if she showed the teeniest hint of resistance, switching back to complete professionalism that only flustered her more most days.

That changed one day when she needed paper for the floor printer.

The supply closet located to the left of the elevator and stairwell was so small it was nearly impossible for two people to fit into the space packed with Xerox packages and janitorial supplies.

Nearly.

“Little Mouse.”

She jumped at the shattered silence until recognition of his baritone registered. “Mr. Akechi, can you please stop doing that?”

“But you make it oh so tempting, I can't help myself.”

“And you said you were more than an average businessman.”

His familiar chuckle pranced across her ears, sending delicious shivers down her spine. “Up to now, I have been. Took pride in my self-control. Imagine my surprise when I witnessed a carefree spirit dancing on my financial floor and suddenly taken by an overpowering urge to join her.”

She blinked up at him silently while he stepped so close she could feel the heat wafting off him though, as usual, he never touched. His words sounded more and more like a confession, an impossible confession. She was just an accountant-- No, wait… Her throat finally opened up for her to ask the question suddenly screaming for an answer. “Did you really promote me for my capabilities, or only to get close to me then?”

The question was out but she looked away, unable to witness the answer with her own eyes. Slender fingers whispered across her jaw, coaxing her to look back up to him. Those same fingers traced her bottom lip once she did, the liquid heat of his eyes taking her breath from her.

“I was already infatuated before walking you to your car, I will admit. Then I pulled your employee records. Spotless with nothing but positive words from your previous superiors. That, alone, wouldn't be very impressive to me but were you aware you have a letter of recommendation from Tokugawa? Those are not easily achieved. Honestly, I have no idea how those other two ever thought they would manage to frame you for their misdeeds. Which is why I gave you the chance to prove yourself first but had the termination papers ready to sign should you have failed that little test, feelings present or not.”

“But I passed.”

“I knew you would-- hoped even. You are talented and earned that position yourself, have no doubt in that.”

“Alright…” Now, how the hell am I supposed to address the other thing?

As if he read her thoughts, he brought the tip of his finger back across her lips to softly silence her. “I know this is not the typically ideal setting for such a conversation but I couldn't hold back any longer when your snark offered the perfect opportunity, Little Mouse. However, you need not worry about rushing me any reciprocation. Take your time to think about it and I will deal with my own troubles in the meantime. Should you choose to explore further, you need only call me by my first name.”

Her heart raced again. He really had thought of everything, even a clear route to refusal… One she didn't need. She didn't need any more time.

He had just turned to leave when her hand landed on his shoulder, stopping him in place.

“Mitsuhi-”

His lips were on hers before she finished the name, demanding entrance that she gave willingly. Her fingers tangled in his blazer lapels in a feeble attempt to hold onto the world around her while blindsided by such feverish desire as he all but devoured her, his tongue coaxing hers to dance with him.

It wasn't until the prep counter edge hit the back of her thighs that she realized her skirt hiked up past her stocking bands as he settled her effortlessly atop its surface, the cold of it a stark reminder to their location.

“Wait,” she gasped once gathering the resolve to break the trance.

His palms dropped from her hair to the counter instantly at her plea while his forehead rested on hers, patiently waiting for her next words.

She smoothed the wrinkles in his jacket her fingers had created as her breath returned. “Not yet, not here.”

“Too soon.” He nodded in agreement as his own eyes cleared of desire's fog. “I'm sorry, it has been quite some time since I've lost rein of my emotions and it looks like I still have a ways to go before I can properly control myself around you.”

She couldn't help the soft giggles bubbling at the confusion clear in his brow. “Usually, I'm the one who has to control herself.”

“No, I don't believe that.”

She ignored his usual teasing while hopping off the counter to right herself again. His fingers brushed lightly through her hair to fix wry tufts while hers continued to focus on his blazer lapels and shirt collar. Only when she finished did she look up into his eyes while claiming his hands in hers. “I am interested but I've also rushed into things a lot in the past and they always ended horribly for everyone. I'm only just now starting to feel confident in my position and think it best-- given my track record-- to go slow.”

His head rested leisurely back to hers and she wondered how he could stand the heat emitting from her flushed face? She barely could. His smirk returned to its rightful place as his thumb ghosted over her bottom lip. Whatever he was about to say, was lost to the door handle clicking.

Mitsuhide had two paper boxes on the counter in the next instant and another occupying his hands before the door cracked open to reveal one of her subordinates. “Everything okay?”

“Oh, what perfect timing!” Mitsuhide grinned to the intruder. “We were just thinking we would need the trolley, but not with an extra set of hands.” The box in his hands shifted so suddenly the poor man at the door nearly fell backward as he tried to catch it, just for Mitsuhide to load another box on top. “You got those, I'll take these, and you can handle that last one, right Little Mouse?”

Proving he truly was a whirlwind incarnate, Mitsuhide was out the door without another glance behind him.

~~~

The premiere performance of Madama Butterfly sold out almost immediately and yet what was it he waved in front of her face one autumn Thursday morning? He even arranged her the day off to prepare for the evening. No dress? He arranged that, too; curating a selection to choose from, as well as a hair and makeup appointment if she desired it.

The show itself was as beautiful as it was heart-wrenching, even with Mitsuhide distracting her a sizable portion of the time by monopolizing her hand with soft caresses and softer kisses over every inch of skin. Afterward, he insisted on showing her the best view in the city which happened to be the rooftop of the office building.

“I didn't know all this was even up here.” She didn't even try to hide the awe in her voice as she took in her surroundings. If she didn't know any better, it would be easy to believe they were in Central Park with the colorful flower beds lining sections of expansive lawn covering a majority of the roof. A covered patio near the door sat upon a raised dais that overlooked the city with an outdoor kitchen and bar. No additional lighting was needed due to the glow provided by the surrounding city life.

“There are only a select few who do, plus the gardener who values his own secrets enough to keep mine.”

“Do I even want to know what that means?”

“Probably not.” Rumbling laughter as he looped an arm around her waist to guide her to the patio where a sake warmer awaited. If anyone had told her at the beginning of the month she would end up enjoying an exotic brew with the boss on the rooftop lounger, she would have laughed in their face! But here she was gazing over the city skyline in an elegant dress and gorgeous hair, a nearly forgotten sake glass in one hand while Mitsuhide occupied the other as he's had during the opera.

Each deliberate drag of lips across her knuckles sent heat racing through her veins that had nothing to do with the sake. Only when he was satisfied no part of her hand went untouched did he move on to continue the trail across her wrist and forearm. Molten gold irises held her own captive as the knuckles of his other hand softly traced her jaw.

"Have you had enough of the view?"

There was no mistaking the true question being asked. The weeks since their closet confessions saw many dinner and lunch dates. Weekends were designated ‘adventure’ days when they found local activities to do together, even if just strolling the shoreline or boardwalk. Almost every outing ended with at least a soft kiss on the top of her head, more than a few escalating to being pinned to the wall much as she had the counter in the stock closet. But every time he would cut it short with a clear question and an easily accessible way out for her to choose.

This time, she didn't.

~☆~

[neuxue]

Wheel of Time liveblogging: The Gathering Storm ch 41

EGWENE!!!!!!! And excellent use of outsider POV! And could Gawyn be more irritating? And EGWENE!!!!!

Chapter 41: A Fount of Power

Ah, the unique and entirely self-inflicted frustration of having to pause for three weeks in the middle of a major battle…

Gawyn continues to exist in this sequence and I am irritated. You’d better impede the awesome, Gawyn.

But we all know what Gawyn’s track record at the Tower looks like, so I’m not holding out a great deal of hope here.

The White Tower itself seemed to burn. It lit a daunting profile in the sky, all white and red, outlined by flames. Smoke boiled toward the midnight clouds above, fires blazed in many Tower windows, and a glare at the base indicated that outlying buildings and trees were also alight.

It’s such a great image, the once-untouchable White Tower burning against the night sky. And on a more symbolic level, it’s as if the truth is finally made visible: the Tower is burning, wounded, vulnerable, and it’s there for anyone to see.

Though right now Gawyn and the soldiers with him are more interested in seeing that there is in fact a secret entrance. And here I was hoping Gawyn might have to resort to banging really hard on the stone wall and shouting for someone to let him in, and eventually Egwene would notice him and shout down to him while lighting a to’raken on fire that she might need to take a rain check on tonight’s date, this really isn’t the best time, she has to go wash her hair.

At least he was finally doing something to help Egwene.

IS HE THOUGH?

Not all princesses want to be rescued from their fiery towers beset by dragons, Gawyn. Some of them might rather like it there. Standing in a badass hero pose, silhouetted against the night sky, surrounded by power, with their hair blowing in the wind.

She’s doing far more to help herself than you are to help her, is what I’m getting at here, Gawyn.

They were gliding directly into a war zone where both sides were stronger than they were, both sides had little reason to like them, and both sides were wielding the One Power. It took a special kind of man to stare those odds in the eyes.

‘Special’ is not exactly the word I would use.

But this frames the whole situation quite nicely: they’re heading straight into a battle in which they are hideously outmatched, with very little idea of what’s going on, for no reason but to rescue someone who has specifically asked not to be rescued. WHY.

They’ve brought a hundred soldiers with them? Again…why? What do they think that will possibly do against a Seanchan attack mounted on dragons and wielding the One Power? It’s too many for stealth, and not enough to actually have an effect. I’m just so confused as to why they’re doing this at all. You’re all going to die and to what purpose?

I suppose disguising themselves as Tower guards helps a bit on the stealth front, but still. Everything about this plan seems terrible.

“It’s always a good idea to have a few copies of your enemy’s uniform.”

“It’s not proper,” Siuan said, folding her arms. “Serving on the Tower Guard is a sacred duty. They—”

“They’re your enemy, Siuan,” Bryne said sternly.

Are they?

How long can they look at the Tower as their enemy before it becomes insurmountable truth? This is why Egwene does not want to be rescued; this is what she has learned in her time as a supposed captive of the Tower. She came here as a result of her own declaration of war against them, true, but that’s a part of this whole arc for her, realising that the Tower and the Aes Sedai there are not her enemies, that she cannot afford for them to be her enemies, even if Elaida is. That the solution must somehow be unity, not war.

Gawyn, Siuan and Bryne took up positions at the front—Gawyn and the general walking just ahead of Siuan, as if they were Warders

Gawyn Trakand, the things you do not notice could literally fill books.

All in all, the illusion was very good. On first glance, Gawyn himself would have bought the disguise.

Yeah, sorry, that’s really not a high bar.

The billowing smoke reflected red firelight, enveloping the Tower in a menacing crimson haze. Holes and gashes broke the walls of the once-majestic building; fires blazed within several of them.

It’s so starkly different from how the Tower has always been described up until now; it’s the sort of language that would much more naturally be associated with, say, Dragonmount. But the illusion of a pure white structure, beautiful and untouchable and eternal, a monument and a lasting symbol of strength, has been shattered, and beneath it is…this. A nightmare of fire and a crumbling structure and chaos, burning.

I just love the contrast, because up until now the descriptions of the Tower have been so consistent, so perfectly crafted to suit an entity that presents only and exactly the image it chooses, never changing, never faltering, never letting anyone see what is truly there. In hindsight, all those descriptions feel a bit like looping a single piece of film across CCTV footage while carrying out a bank robbery. Too perfect, too still. And so to now get these descriptions instead is perfect in its suddenness, jarring in the way a shattering is as the illusion is forcibly broken away.

Up above, near the middle of the Tower, several gashes were spewing fireballs and lighting back out at the invaders.

EGWENE! Maybe Gawyn will see her as the absolute fucking badass that she is and will realise that she is way, way out of his league, and will give up and go home and leave Egwene to be awesome in peace.

“Now what?” Gawyn whispered.

Great plan, guys.

“We find Egwene,” Siuan answered. “We start at the base, then head down to the basement floors. She was locked down there somewhere earlier today, and it’s probably the first place we should look.”

Oh, ye of little faith. How can even you, Siuan, have so little confidence in her? You’ve seen her take on a Hall that treated her like a puppet, you’ve sent her to hunt the Black Ajah as little more than a novice, you know her strength and resourcefulness and ability.

Gawyn, she’s supposed to be the woman you love, and therefore someone you should have confidence in, and assume competence of. That’s how it works, right?

Bryne, you swore allegiance to her when, again, she was to all appearances just a girl raised Amyrlin so that it would be easy to pull her strings. You gave her an army and trusted that she would know what to do with it.

And yet NONE OF YOU look at the battle taking place, and think that maybe Egwene is in the middle of it, that maybe Egwene has done what she does and found a way to turn an impossible situation to her advantage, or at least found a way to fight back. Give her some credit already!

I know, I know, based on the information they have, her situation is Hashtag Not Great, but…come on, this is Egwene we’re talking about! Even if ‘ah she’s probably found a way to be badass and claim the Amyrlin’s authority at least as a battlefield commission in order to get shit done when no one else can and save the Tower’ isn’t the default assumption, they should at least entertain the possibility that she’s managed to figure something out, that she’s found a way to fight back.

Though in Siuan’s case, I wonder if there’s an element of…projection? After all, she was a clever and capable and powerful Amyrlin, but she was dancing on thin ice for a long time with the coming of the Dragon Reborn and the secrets she held and the course she was trying to take, and she did not see the coup coming, and for all her own resourcefulness and strength she was unable to save herself from it. So from her I wonder if it’s not so much a lack of confidence in Egwene as a sense of something almost like déjà vu, of looking at this situation and being terrified that it’s happening again, that what happened to her will happen to Egwene because even the most capable can be brought down.

Gawyn has no excuse though. He’s had many, many opportunities to give his girlfriend a single vote of confidence and he always seems to…not do that. It’s very frustrating.

Oh thank the Light it’s a POV switch.

I should have known it would be Saerin trying to actually implement some sort of strategy. Or one of that group, anyway; they’re some of the few who have managed bipartisan talks cooperation and effective work towards an actual goal lately.

Around her, the room was in virtual chaos.

I think this is a case of somewhere the word ‘literal’ would actually be appropriate…

Moradri was a long-limbed Mayener with dark skin, and she was trailed by two handsome Warders, both also Mayener. Rumours said that they were her brothers, come to the White Tower to defend their sister

Okay I know we’re in the middle of a battle here but this is such an interesting little aside! On the one hand, I’m almost surprised we haven’t seen instances of the Warder bond being used between siblings, but on the other hand, speaking as someone who has a sibling…wow. That would be uh. Interesting. And yet it also makes a lot of sense, given that it is by definition an incredibly close bond requiring a great deal of trust and a long partnership…but also two brothers as Warders. What a family! I suddenly want all of the backstory here.

No Greens to be found. We know where Adelorna is, at least, but it’s really not all that surprising, if you think about it.

“A pity,” Saerin said. “They like to call themselves the Battle Ajah, after all. Well, that leaves me to organise the fighting.”

They’re the Battle Ajah, but I think that the Tower’s long tendencies towards secrecy, isolation and insulation, noninterference between sisters, and manipulation rather than outright participation in any sort of war or battle has not just had an impact on the Greens’ ability to work as anything resembling a cohesive group, but is also a set of attitudes that would end up forcing tactics over strategy in a battle situation.

Whereas someone like Saerin, or really any of the Brown Ajah who have made war and strategy a part of their studies might well be better suited to the more administrative – but oh so massively underrated and vitally important – aspects of fighting.

Saerin eyed the Green sister, then tapped the map. “Mark the locations, Moradri. You can go back to the fighting soon enough, but your knowledge is more important right now.”

Yes, exactly this. Moradri wants to be out there fighting, because that’s what her Ajah’s attitude is or has become. And because if they all see themselves as individuals acting separately, of course the impulse is to go out and fight directly, rather than recognise that they’ll actually be more successful if they coordinate, and that all of them just throwing all their firepower at whatever they can reach is not the most efficient approach.

They have fighting skills, it seems, but they don’t know how to function as any sort of military force. Because the Tower’s attitudes haven’t allowed for that sort of thinking or cohesiveness to ever emerge.

So you need the people who can stand back rather than rushing straight in to where the fighting is thickest, who can pull out the maps and watch what’s happening and bring some level of organisation to the chaos, and send out those who do have the actual hands-on fighting ability but may lack the mindset for looking at the bigger picture.

Which of course is just another of the already myriad reasons the Ajahs need to work together and maybe, I don’t know, communicate and recognise that they all have valuable but different skills to contribute and that they’re stronger and more capable as a whole than as a disparate set of individuals, but…well, that’s sort of the whole point of the Tower’s story, isn’t it? United we stand, divided we fall, and all that.

“Captain, our most important task is to form a centre of operations. Aes Sedai and soldiers alike are scrambling about independently, acting like rats faced by wolves. We need to stand together.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself. Not that that’s ever stopped me from spending a few hundred words trying…

It’s not just that they need to stand together, though. It’s that they need to work together, and delegate tasks, and understand that it’s not just about firepower here. That they need a centre of operations, and that means some of them hanging back from the fighting, in order to make that fighting more efficient.

And I like that it isn’t Egwene organising this. Because Egwene is so much better suited to doing exactly what she’s doing: leading from the front, by example, and demonstrating in highly effective fashion the importance of having battle-ready tacticians who can hold their own in the middle of a fight and respond quickly. Egwene is somewhat more of a tactician than a strategist, and in a way she’s an example of what the Green Ajah could and should be, because she doesn’t only consider herself, and she doesn’t approach the fight as an individual but rather as a leader, taking into account the other people around her and how they can have the most impact.

But she goes straight for the front lines; Egwene is not exactly a character to hold herself back from…anything, really. She’s not the sort of person who would be in Saerin’s role—before or after a battle, maybe, but not during one. So I like that we get to see the importance of both. That Egwene gets to be badass as the Amyrlin in battle, but we also get this quiet emphasis on how important it is for the rest of the Tower to come together, to figure out how to strategise as a whole rather than a bunch of individuals. Egwene is fighting for the Tower, but the Tower also needs to learn how to fight for itself in order to back her up, and follow that lead. And for that, they need not just a leader like Egwene, but people like Saerin who can fill those desperately needed administrative and strategic roles, and look beyond the divisions as Egwene has been trying so hard to get them to do.

I also like that Saerin explicitly acknowledges Egwene in her thoughts, because Egwene isn’t here—and shouldn’t be; she’s doing just fine right where she is—but this is largely due to her influence. She can’t play every role herself, and what she’s doing right now is probably the best thing she could possibly be doing, but this is why she’s been trying to get them to break down those barriers between the Ajahs and even between the sisters themselves. Because Tarmon Gai’don is coming, and they need all of those skills—not just the fighters, or the healers, or the strategists, or the historians, but all of them, contributing their individual strengths. Just as we see Saerin doing here.

“This is a disaster!” an angry voice shouted.

Katerine, at least fifteen minutes late and not even bringing Starbucks.

“How dare they strike here!” Katerine continued.

Yes, Katerine, we see what you’re doing. It’s something the Black Ajah has been frighteningly successful at: sowing this sort of discord and inward-looking righteous anger and doing everything in their power to keep the Tower, and the Aes Sedai within it, from looking past themselves and their status and superiority.

So she comes into this ad-hoc centre of operations trying to rile them all up, because that’s the best way to ensure that they continue to face this threat as no more than an angry set of individuals, rather than putting aside insult or anger or fear for a while in order to fight back.

“We need to scour the Tower and eliminate each of them!”

It’s such a transparent attempt to divide them, and yet they’re all so divided already that would probably work, if Saerin weren’t here to immediately stomp out the bullshit.

Saerin raised an eyebrow. “Since when did the Mistress of Novices outrank a Sitter in the Hall, Katerine?”

Katerine tries to play the Red vs Brown angle but Saerin’s response is excellent not just because Katerine is a pain in our collective arses and it’s nice to see someone give her the verbal slap in the face she so deserves, but because it completely…not just ignores but takes all the relevance out of their difference in Ajahs. Saerin is a Sitter and Katerine is not and they’re under attack and it doesn’t matter what Ajah they are.

It reminds me, really, of Egwene telling Adelorna that for now, Adelorna and the others must call her Mother and accept her authority (also can I just say as an aside how much I love that the title of authority claimed by a leader in the midst of battle is Mother? Like what a way to quietly and without even addressing it subvert military and battle gender expectations and stereotypes). Saerin’s doing a similar thing in the…centre of operations, such as it is. She claims authority through competence, and for now they have to just accept that.

This battle isn’t really about the Seanchan so much as it’s about the Tower having to confront some hard truths about itself, which means it’s a time when characters like Egwene but also characters like Saerin get a chance to shine.

Another boom sounded outside.

“Where do those keep coming from?” Saerin asked in annoyance. “Haven’t they made enough holes?”

They?

“No, Aes Sedai!” the guard said. “I think it was a blast thrown from within the Tower, launched from one of the upper floors out at the flying creatures.” “Well at least someone else is fighting back,” Saerin said.

OH YOU HAVE NO IDEA.

She doesn’t, does she? Of course she wouldn’t. Because the Tower is a mess and there’s so little communication and even those like Egwene and Saerin who are trying to coordinate an actual defence—either by enacting it with whatever resources they can reach, or by trying to form a central command hub—are isolated from one another, and no one knows what’s going on.

“It appears that there’s a second rallying point for the defence, and it’s doing very well.”

YOU DON’T SAY. Tell us more, Captain. Paint us a picture of Egwene being a force of light, a rallying point for the Tower.

Have I mentioned I love outsider POV? We’re not even seeing Egwene through any of these characters’ eyes but that almost makes it better, because as the reader you know who they’re talking about even when they don’t. You can watch them try in wonder and surprise to work it out, or to see Saerin take it in stride but also with a clear sense of relief and even excitement, and you know who is causing that, who is having that kind of impact. There’s a particular kind of delight as a reader in seeing other characters in some form of awe or respect or even just surprise or relief at what you know to be another character’s actions, but their reaction isn’t for the character, it’s for what the character has done. It’s for the awesome, even when they don’t know the source of the awesome, but as a reader you do and it’s wonderful. This is maybe a weirdly specific thing to love, but love it I do.  

“Where?” Saerin asked eagerly. “Specifically?”

“The twenty-second, Aes Sedai. Northeastern quarter.”

“What?” Katerine asked. “The Brown Ajah sections?”

No. That was what had been there before. Now, with the swapping of the Tower’s corridors, that area of the Tower was…

THIS IS EVERYTHING I WANTED IT TO BE.

This slow realisation, the amazement first at the fact that there’s a strong defence at all, and then wondering who and how, and then this gradual realisation that wait, wait…

It’s not suspense, exactly, because as a reader you know exactly who and how, but watching other characters realise is just delicious.

“The novices’ quarters?” Saerin said. That seemed even more ridiculous. “How in the world…” She trailed off, eyes widening slightly. “Egwene.”

I LOVE EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS SO MUCH.

This, this is why I absolutely adore outsider POV. It’s that sense of…triumph by proxy, that thrill of other characters realising, and really seeing Egwene for the first time in a new light, even when she’s not actually there. Perhaps even because she’s not actually there. Those moments when characters recognise something in another that you’ve known all along but seeing it through new eyes it’s almost like getting to see it again for the first time.

Also okay, I’m just a simple girl with simple needs, and so if you give me a character breathing another character’s name in astonishment and realisation, I will be happy.

It’s especially effective because this is what Egwene has been working towards for so long, and we’ve seen bits and pieces of it—of the way the other Aes Sedai see her shifting—but this is where it really seems to happen. Where someone like Saerin fully understands that this girl is no novice, that she’s not a wilfull child or a puppet manipulated into declaring herself Amyrlin. This is where, again perhaps because Egwene isn’t actually there, she and maybe the others can look past Egwene’s youth and her novice dress and see what they’ve been unable or unwilling to see before. That this woman is the Amyrlin, and she is a force to be reckoned with, and she will save the Tower by sheer force of will if she has to.

I also like how that realisation is coming right on the heels of a very different mood of outsider-POV-realisations-about-a-character with Rand. Mostly in seeing him through Tuon’s eyes, but even seeing him through Min’s when he burned Natrin’s Barrow. There, it was watching other characters finally realise just how terrifying he has become—or in Tuon’s case, you get the same impression because it’s her first time meeting him and what she sees and thinks about shows Rand in a very different light, seen through the eyes of someone who has not been watching him all along and doesn’t still see, at least a little bit, the boy from Emond’s Field.

And now you get the same thing with Egwene—the realisation that she is not just a girl from Emond’s Field claiming authority she doesn’t have, and that she is a force to be reckoned with, and that she’s so much more than they assumed her to be—but in every other aspect it’s opposite to what we see with Rand. And yet conveyed through the same techniques, and even with the Seanchan as backdrop, to some extent.

Now over to Egwene herself!

Egwene stood at an open hole in the side of the White Tower, wind pulling at her white dress, tugging at her hair, howling as if in accompaniment to her rage.

I do love these…Hero Pose Portraits we get of her. Egwene at the heart of the storm, wind in her hair and fire in her eyes. It’s a strong visual, and a very recognisable one. This is absolutely and immediately recognisable as a Hero Pose, and I suppose it’s a good example of how some tropes are tropes because damn it they work.

Her anger was not out of control. It was cold and distilled. The Tower was burning.

Are you tired of me drawing parallels and contrasts between her and Rand yet? Yes? Well, too bad.

‘Cold’ is definitely a description pretty strongly associated with Rand at this point, cold and hard and emotionless. And right at this moment, yes, Egwene is cold and calm and ruthless. She’s in the middle of a battle; she has to be. She has to be able to order the novices to form circles and fight with her, she has to be able to strike to kill, to bring down raken that may be carrying Aes Sedai captives. She has to be able to think, and to respond to the Seanchan’s attacks, and plan her own.

But the difference between her and Rand here is that Egwene uses that as a temporary state, and even then she doesn’t deny her emotions, or push them down so far that they end up stabbing her to death from the inside with their tiny spiteful knives (don’t lie to me, Rand, that’s exactly what’s going on and we both know it).

It’s like when she told herself steel yourself, Egwene, before reading through the list of dead ladies Black Ajah members. There are times when a measure of cold is needed. There are times to put emotion aside for later. But she doesn’t try to become that cold. She doesn’t try to become steel. She can harden herself to battle when she has to, and she does a bloody good job of it, but she’s not trying to flay herself into  a permanent state of it as a way of dealing with what she must do.

She can embrace pain, but embracing it also means accepting and acknowledging and feeling it, and understanding that her aims are simply more important than the pain. She can steel herself to harsh truth, but she also takes a few moments to work through the emotional turmoil it causes.

It’s an issue of moderation; Egwene seems to have found a balance of sorts, where Rand has gone to an extreme. She can access that place of calm, cold determination, but she doesn’t have to take up permanent residence there (which is good because wow, here I thought America’s citizenship path was demanding). And she has a very clear sense of why she’s doing this; it’s something she has chosen, and something she will fight for because she believes it is worth fighting for. The fact that she cares is what enables her to do this at all, whereas Rand feels like he has to not care about anything in order to reach a state where he can do anything.

She directed her anger—the anger of justice, the wrath of the Amyrlin.

She can be cold in the midst of battle, but she’s channelling her anger into that rather than denying it. She is not unfeeling, here; this is not like Rand so calmly and so quietly erasing a fortress with balefire, knowing it should terrify him and yet feeling nothing at all. She is angry and she accepts that anger and both the power and the consequences of it.

And I think maybe it comes down to choices, again. Egwene can kill for the Tower because she chose her role; she may not actually want to kill people but it doesn’t threaten to destroy her when she has to, because she accepts it as part of the path and cause and role she has chosen. Not that she specifically chose the killing people part, or necessarily would have, but I think she doesn’t see it as a duty she is forced to bear, a role she is forced to play, blood that is demanded of her. She chose the Tower and she chose to be Amyrlin and she chose to leave Emond’s Field and she chose to be the person she is now and give herself to this cause, and so if this is part of it, well, then, that is what she will do. It feels like one of those lines that is both vast and yet so small, just a matter of perspective and nuance, and yet it makes such a huge difference to almost everything.

She was a fount of Power, drawn from deep within the fluted rod in her hands, channelled through a group of novices and Accepted hiding in the room behind, bound to her in circle. Egwene was part of the fires that burned in the Tower, bloodying the sky with their flames, painting the air with their smoke. She almost seemed not a being of flesh, but one of pure Power, sending judgement to those who had dared bring war to the Tower itself. Blasts of lightning stormed from the sky, the clouds churning above. Fire sprouted from her hands.

This is absolutely beautiful, and so, so similar to how Rand was described, as a force of Light, a being seemingly made of light and Power rather than flesh, channelling through a ter’angreal that shone in his hands. And at the end, fire.

It’s such an eerily similar description, and it carries the same beauty and power, and yet the context and therefore feeling it evokes is so completely different. These are the parallels I love, where the scenes are almost mirrors of each other, where the actions or situations are almost identical, and yet a simple shift in perspective or sense of agency or reasoning can make it look completely and utterly opposite.

With Rand, this image was one to evoke a sense of quiet horror, beauty and yet terror, a pause before the step across a line, the sort of silence and blinding power and then act that leaves no breath or words for making sense of what has just happened. But now, the almost identical image is one of wrath and justice and power and triumph—there’s a harshness to it, yes, but it’s all for a purpose, and there is no silent gaping absence of emotion, no moment where it seems the whole world is drawing in in horror before the release.

With Rand, the eeriness came in part from the complete absence of violence in the description. It was just beauty and power and then…that. Whereas with Egwene the violence is a part of it; the description is beautiful and she is a being of power but we have fires the burned the Tower and bloodying the sky and painting the air with their smoke and blasts and churned. There is no denial of violence here, just as there is no denial of the emotional aspect of it. This isn’t quiet the way Rand’s scene was, because nothing is being muted or suppressed here. There isn’t a sense of absence, or of something vital missing. There’s just violent, terrible, beautiful power and triumph and anger and desperate defense and vengeance and justice. No, it’s not kind. But it’s not meant to be. And so it has none of the eeriness of A Force of Light, none of the growing horror at how soft and quiet everything was contrasted with what it was.

And I like the nod here to the Amyrlin being one with the Tower, in the way we’re always given the Dragon as one with the land.

Perhaps she should have feared breaking the Three Oaths. But she did not. This was a fight that needed to be fought, and she did not lust for death—though, perhaps, her rage against the sul’dam approached it. The soldiers and damane were unfortunate casualties.

The White Tower, the sacred dwelling of the Aes Sedai, was under attack. They were all in dagner, a danger greater than death. Those silvery collars were far worse. Egwene defended herself and each woman in the Tower.

Okay, I’m glad we at least got some acknowledgement that this is on the fuzzy side of compliance with the Three Oaths, though I’m still surprised Adelorna didn’t even think about it.

For the record, I have absolutely no problems with what Egwene is doing; the Seanchan attacked first, and they’re attacking to capture or kill, and if Egwene can spin that into defending her life and the lives of all the Aes Sedai in the Tower in order to comply with the oath against using the Power as a weapon, great. But it is definitely in a slightly grey area of that particular oath, so I’m glad we’re seeing some awareness of that.

And…yeah, she’s not killing because killing is fun, but she’s also not going to be torturing herself with the blood on her hands after this. Would she have chosen this battle? No. But it’s here and this is the role she has chosen, and so this is a part of what that means, and she can accept that. Even somewhat coldly, in the moment—but again I don’t think it’s a complete absence of feeling so much as an acceptance, and a lack of…heaping unnecessary pain on herself because of the things that she has to do.

(And I’m just going to continue to ignore the ‘worse than death’ thing because I said so).

The attackers prepared weaves to strike her down, but each time Egwene struck first, either deflecting the balls of fire with a blast of air or simply bringing down the to’raken who carried the women trying to kill her.

A one-woman anti-aircraft gun.

Something I really like about this fight is that it doesn’t shy away from the fact that Egwene is in battle, with a body count, aiming to kill. It’s something that often is…avoided…with female protagonists. Implied, sometimes, but often euphemised or glossed over or never really verified on-screen. A bit like how we see Aviendha, actually; she’s a former Maiden of the Spear and it’s kind of assumed that she has been in fights and has killed people, but it’s definitely told more than shown. So you get a fair amount of that (and then there’s Tamora Pierce, doing the Good Work and providing all kinds of Ladies With Swords content), but this is definitely more rare.

And yet Egwene gets to have that, and it’s not written as a stain on her character, or as something that’s going to cause an existential crisis. It’s just who and where she is: she is the Amyrlin and the Tower is under attack and she is on the front lines defending, and that means she is in a battle, and she is fighting and fighting to kill. Just as Mat and Perrin and Rand have been. And it’s not written differently because she’s a woman, or even written in such a way as to highlight that at all. It’s just written as a powerful main character in a battle for her life and the cause she’s defending.

Between Falme and Cairhien and now this, she’s probably in the running for second-highest body count after Rand (maybe third; Mat is almost certainly higher and it’s hard to say with Perrin), but it’s not made into a Thing any more than it is for any of them. Nor is she the seductress/femme-fatale type you often see with women who have blood on their hands. She’s just…a powerful character in a position that means she sees battle, and she’s really not treated any differently in that sense than the male characters in similar positions. Which I really, really appreciate.

Some would escape. But they would pay dearly. That was another goal. She had to make certain they never attacked the Tower again.

This raid had to cost them.

And this is the other thing I like: that she’s allowed to have this edge. She is fighting on the defensive, and out of necessity, but she is also approaching it as a tactician, and it is a battle, and could turn into an ongoing war. So she’s doing what she can to prevent that, which means making it cost them—which means killing them. She’s allowed that ruthlessness, just as she has always been allowed ambition; two traits that are sometimes hard to find in non-villain female characters.

Over to Bryne now, who is busy dodging a burning raken. Probably Egwene’s welcome gift to him; she’s a bit busy to send flowers.

It’s a shame Bashere isn’t here; he’d probably commandeer one and honestly I want nothing more.

Were the Seanchan running away from something or just looking for a fight?

Not something, Bryne. They are absolutely fleeing someone and I cannot wait for you to work it out. Because watching people work out how very capable and frankly terrifying Egwene is has been the best part of these chapters.

Well, aside from Egwene herself, of course.

I don’t want Bryne to admire Gawyn’s swordsmanship because that means I have to accept that Gawyn’s good with a sword and—okay, this sentence was actually going somewhere but it got derailed when I realised I was just diving headfirst into truly awful innuendo. Ow. Well, whatever Gawyn, Galad is still the better swordsman and Mat could take both of you with a stick and Lan could probably take all three of you without breaking a sweat and—yeah, no, that sentence wasn’t any better. I give up.

Gawyn unsheathed his own blade, on edge. “Look up there,” he said, and pointed with his sword. […] “By the Light…” Bryne whispered, focusing on the gap. A solitary figure wearing white stood in the Tower’s rent.

AW YEAH.

The theme of this chapter is whispered awe at the sight or even realisation of Egwene and I am here for it.

And yes, Bryne. By the Light indeed. Even more so than you meant it, I think.

It’s just SUCH A GOOD IMAGE, a solitary figure in white, alone and yet the essence of the Tower itself, as it should be; the Amyrlin even dressed as a novice, standing in a fracture in the Tower because she is the one holding it together, holding its attackers at bay.

It was too distant to make out her face, even with the spyglass, but whoever she was

ARE YOU SHITTING ME. ‘Whoever she was’? Surely one of you at least has a fleeting suspicion at this point?

Whoever she was, she was certainly doing some damage to the Seanchan. Her arms were upraised with fire glowing between  her hands, the burning light throwing shadows across the outer Tower wall around her.

Setting aside the fact that her boyfriend and her general can’t seem to recognise her, I love all these glimpses we get of her throughout the battle. We only see briefly from her POV, but to those who see her…the descriptions are all in this mode of the heroic bordering almost on the divine. A force of light and power, a solitary figure in white, arms upraised and fire in her hands, a symbol of strength and determination and everything the Tower should be. And she is always met with awe and almost wonder; it’s such a great way to show a character coming well and truly into her own in the eyes of those around her.

Except, apparently, for Bryne and Gawyn, who still don’t even consider that it could be her. WHO THE FUCK ELSE WOULD IT BE?

I am Disgruntled.

(Also, the burning light throwing shadows is again so similar to the description of Rand in A Force of Light that it’s almost hard to tell the quotes apart…and yet while the visual imagery is the same, almost nothing else is. On the one hand destruction, and on the other, salvation).

The badly wounded would be abandoned into enemy hands, but they had been warned of that possibility before coming on this mission. Recovering the Amyrlin outweighed all other concerns.

Except by ‘enemy’ he means the Tower and not the Seanchan, and he looks at the whole battle against the Seanchan as a distraction from their real purpose, and really none of them should be enemies and he just saw the Amyrlin and she certainly did not need recovering and really…everything is wrong here. None of them should be fighting, and yet they are, and all sides or contingents involved have a different thought as to who the enemy even is, and it’s just confusion and chaos because none of this should be happening at all.

“And if you’d been recognised?” he demanded. “Siuan, these people tried to execute you!”

She sniffed. “Moiraine herself wouldn’t recognise me with this face.”

Wow, okay, I’m not sure why this hit me the way it did but something about the fact that she so reflexively uses Moiraine as the reference point her …as far as Siuan knows, Moiraine is dead, and yet she has for so long been the person Siuan was closest to, the one other person who shared their secret for twenty years, her best friend and onetime lover and just the way she says it, ‘Moiraine herself’, without seeming to even think about it…I don’t know, it came out of nowhere and yet of course that’s what she would say and suddenly I’m a little bit sad.

There are a lot of reunions—or even first-time meetings—I’m hoping for before the end, but Moiraine and Siuan are very high on the list. They are the only ones left of the ones who began this, and I just want them to have a moment to see one another again and be able to share that knowledge of how far they have come and all they have done, even if it’s bittersweet, and maybe even get to finally lay that duty down and look ahead to a life in this world they’ve given so much of their lives to save.

Anyway she’s found a novice who should at least be able to tell them what’s going on, and by ‘what’s going on’ I mean ‘that Egwene is a badass and they don’t need to rescue her because she’s busy rescuing the entire Tower, so maybe they could just go help her out with that’.

“The Amyrlin, Egwene al’Vere,” the novice said in a quivering voice. “She was released from the cells earlier today and allowed to return to the novices’ quarters.”

And the novices’ quarters aren’t where they were, so there’s still some reason for Siuan and the others to not immediately put two and two together to make ‘Egwene is a badass and they don’t need to rescue her because she’s busy rescuing the Tower, so maybe they culd just go help her out with that’ but the fact that still none of them have even considered the possibility is DRIVING ME MAD.

“But she’s probably up on the twenty-first or twenty-second level somewhere. That’s where the novices’ quarters are now.”

Okay, no more excuses.

AND YET. THEY STILL. DO NOT EVEN THINK. THAT MAYBE THE GLORIOUS AND TERRIBLE WOMAN WITH FIRE IN HER HANDS AND A WHITE NOVICE DRESS IS THEIR AMYRLIN.

I am, of course, most disappointed in Gawyn who should be the one going ‘Wait! What if that was Egwene! My girlfriend is awesome and capable and maybe she’s managed to find a way to fight!’ but instead goes straight for ‘We’ve got to reach her!’

He was the one who pointed her out, even. Worst Boyfriend of the Year.

I cannot believe I have been forced to a point where I wish that, if she had to choose one of the Brothers Arthurian, she had chosen Galad. I resent this.

“You’re here to rescue her, aren’t you?” The novice sounded eager.

Bryne eyed the girl. Child, I wish you hadn’t made that connection.

What, you thought there was even a slight chance that she wouldn’t? With you storming into the Tower and talking about Egwene and immediately saying you have to go and find her? Just because you three are all being as dense as bricks about what’s right in front of you doesn’t mean everyone else is.

As much as I loved the way Saerin’s realisation that Egwene was the one organising the fight against the Seanchan, the astonishment as she said Egwene’s name and understood what was happening? That’s how much I’m annoyed at seeing Bryne and Gawyn and Siuan fail to realise the same thing.

Especially because really, they have just as much information as Saerin did, and she worked it out. More information, even; they’ve actually seen Egwene, even if they couldn’t make out her face. *Shakes head* I’m not mad; I’m just very disappointed in the three of you.

Pause for a quick Healing break because this lot have brought swords to a One Power fight.

Would [the Tower] ever be the same again, or had a seemingly eternal monument fallen this evening? Was he proud or grieved to have witnessed it?

This, I like, because it’s one of the threads running through this whole chapter—and, really, through most of the series, especially since The Shadow Rising. Now, though, the cracks that have spidered their way up the Tower are made plain for the world to see, thrown open beyond anyone’s ability to hide. It’s that destruction of the illusion of invincibility, which can utterly flip entire worldviews. The realisation that something once considered untouchable is just as vulnerable as anywhere else, and I am…somewhat put in mind of an aspect of a nation’s response to fall of another (set of) tower(s); a lot has been written about the realisation of vulnerability that caused, and the effect it’s had on the sociopolitical landscape of the entire country pretty much since then. There’s definitely a paradigm shift that occurs with that sort of realisation or fracturing of worldview.

I like Bryne’s…confusion isn’t the word I want but it’ll have to do…at whether he feels proud or grieved to be seeing this. He’s not really a part of the Tower—I mean, he serves a claimant to the Amyrlin Seat and he’s bonded now to a former Amyrlin and his focus has been on fighting to reclaim the Tower, so okay, he’s got some ties there, but he’s not Aes Sedai, and he’s not from Tar Valon, and for most of his life he has been no more tied to the Tower than anyone on this continent. But it’s been a constant throughout all that time; love it or hate it or fear it, the Tower has been the Tower for as long as anyone alive can remember. So to watch this…there could be a sense of pride, or perhaps of justice or vindication in seeing the arrogance of the Aes Sedai brought low. But at the same time…it has been a constant, and while the Aes Sedai are far from perfect, what does it mean for the world if they are show to be truly fallible? If the Tower can break, what else will follow? It’s the sense of an ending; it’s one thing to know Tarmon Gaidon is coming, but another to watch as a symbol of your time is destroyed.

No time for philosophical pondering, though, because he has to go stab a guy.

Was this one of the Bloodknives? It certainly looks to be; pity that didn’t help him against a Warder’s reflexes.

Assassins. They always seemed to look the same, regardless of the culture.

This feels like an author poking fun, and I had to laugh.

“Min,” Siuan said, sounding tired. Those Healings seemed to have taken a lot out of her. “She said I had to stay near you.” She paused. “If you hadn’t come tonight, I would have died.”

“Well,” Bryne said, “I am your Warder. I suspect it won’t be the only time I save you.” Why had it grown so warm all of a sudden.

“Yes,” Siuan said, standing up. “But this is different. Min said I’d die, and…No, wait. That’s not what Min said exactly. She said that if I didn’t stay close to you, we’d both die.”

And she proceeds to pull a poisoned needle out of his arm. So Min was right, but her viewing only ended up being true because she told Siuan about it, because if she hadn’t, then Siuan wouldn’t have paused to think about it and about the other half of it, which implies that—okay, no, that way lies brain-pain. Do Not Think Too Hard About Foretellings And Prophecies: rule number one of reading fantasy (without falling into an infinite loop).

“But I wouldn’t have been poisoned if I hadn’t come!” “Don’t try to apply logic to a viewing or Foretelling like this”

It’s like you read my mind, Siuan. Or, more likely, Sanderson. A little nod to the nature of the genre, there?

Egwene sat, exhausted, on a pile of rubble, staring out of the hole in the White Tower, watching fires burn below.

I love that this is how we begin her POV here. We’ve seen her glorious in battle, full of cold anger and justice and determination, we’ve seen other characters look to her in awe, and the Seanchan have fled from her…

And, in victory, all we see is exhaustion. Exhaustion and the aftermath—the Tower is still broken, the fires still burn. They have won, but there is a price.

It’s such an excellent contrast to the imagery and mood from the battle itself, and it’s perfect in the way so many of the battle-aftermath scenes have been in this series. It’s that sense of…only a battle lost is sadder than a battle won.

She has fought, and she has won, but while there was a sense of triumph and strength in the moment, now there’s just…exhaustion and rubble. They’ve won, but it has taken so much, and they’ve taken wounds, and it’s not truly over. And like so many battles in the series, it wasn’t even against the Shadow; it was against those who should not be enemies and yet are, because they cannot find common ground.

And…I just realised something. This was Egwene’s parallel to A Force of Light (well, parallel and inversion) but it was also her Dumai’s Wells. The Seanchan are, in a way, her Shaido; the Shaido were the catalyst for much of Rand’s early arc and steps along the path that led him to where he is now, and at Dumai’s Wells he broke free from the box he was kept in and found himself surrounded by them and thought They will pay. I am the Lord of the Morning. And then he destroyed them—or, commanded and witnessed their destruction until he couldn’t take it anymore and they fled—in a vicious battle that ended in definitive but pyrrhic victory, as well as Aes Sedai swearing fealty to him.

Meanwhile, the Seanchan were the catalyst for much of Egwene’s early arc and steps along the path that have led her to where she is, and now she has just been freed from the box-like prison cell where she was held and beaten, and she finds herself surrounded by the Seanchan and thinks They would pay dearly. This raid had to cost them, and destroys them with fire and the One Power resulting in victory, but one that comes at the high cost to the nearly-destroyed Tower, but has led to Aes Sedai accepting her authority and seems likely to lead to Aes Sedai acknowledging her as Amyrlin.

Though, of course, there’s the usual inversion of tone to a certain extent; this doesn’t feel like Egwene’s darkest hour, even with the exhaustion and destruction that follows. But I think the point is that it so easily could have been, that so much depends on perception.

It’s also just a really cool set of parallels.

A few sisters weaving Air or Water could make short work of the flames, preserving the Tower. What was left of it.

Egwene closed her eyes and lay back, resting against the fragments of a wall, feeling the fresh breeze blow across her.

Here, again, we get a sense almost of the Amyrlin as one with the Tower. Victorious, technically, but beaten and exhausted and still burning, unable to do anything but lie back against the fragments of what was. With the wind, of course. Of course a wind rises, here.

Egwene wanted to help. A part of her did, at least. A sliver. But Light, she was tired! She couldn’t channel another trickle, not even using the sa’angreal. She’d pushed the limits of what she could manage. But she was so worn out now that she woudn’t be able to embrace the Source if she tried.

Oh, Egwene. It is a heavy mountain to carry, even if it is one she has largely chosen, or believes she has chosen. But she has been through so much in the last…well, twelve books but particularly the last few weeks, and she just faced the strength of the Seanchan while barely able to channel unaided, and still the Tower is broken and still there is more to do and she wants to help but there are limits and she is far past them.

Not that that always stops her, but…there’s a sense here not quite of despair but I guess that she’s been doing too much of this alone for too long. She’s held the Tower together and defended it all while those within it have tried to break her even as the Tower itself was breaking—the Tower is one with the Amyrlin and the Amyrlin is one with the Tower—and maybe now it’s up to some of them to put the fires out. To begin the repair. To help her hold the Tower together, because there’s no point if they don’t join her; there’s no point in her holding it up if the Aes Sedai don’t rally to the same cause.

And so perhaps it’s not up to her to help, here. She has done what she can for them, and she will continue to do more, but right now it’s time for them to take some steps of their own, to decide whether the Tower will in fact be saved, or whether they will let it fall.

She’d fought. She’d been glorious and destructive, the Amyrlin of judgement and fury, Green Ajah to the core. And still, the Tower had burned.

This is so, so lovely. I love that glorious and destructive are the words she chooses. There is absolutely a salvation/destruction duality to what she has done here, and I’m not even going to parallel it with Rand’s own entire character and story of salvation and destruction, but instead I just think it’s perfect for her situation and for the Tower itself.

She fought, and fought beautifully, and despite all her power and determination, the Tower burned. Because it can’t just be her; for the Tower to stand, it has to be unified. There is only so much she can do alone, and until the others truly join her and decide for themselves to save the Tower, she can only just hold it together, no matter how strong she is. She can lead, but only if they decide to follow. Otherwise she is holding together an empty shell of a memory of a possibility.

I just love aftermath scenes.

So much.

Especially the way they’re done in this series. Joyful or despairing, gloriously alive or exhausted, bittersweet or just bitter, triumphant or anticlimactic, they’re so varied and yet so perfectly suited to what they follow.

Egwene has done everything she possibly can and more, and yet the Tower is still crumbling around her, and so this almost-despairing exaustion is perfect, because what more can she do? Alone, nothing. And yet she can’t give up, can’t stop trying.

The White Tower was broken, physically now as well as spiritually. They’d need a strong leader to rebuild. The next few days would be pivotal. It made her more than exhausted to consider the work she’d need to do.

I’ve talked a lot about how Egwene is a hero-by-choice rather than a Chosen One, but I like that she gets to have these moments where…despite all of that, sometimes it’s really fucking hard. She belives in what she is doing, and embraces her role, and has a sense of agency that many heroes lack because she did choose, but that doesn’t mean she can’t be pushed past the limits of her own endurance. It doesn’t mean she is immune to despair or to doubt or to sheer tiredness. So much has been asked of her, and she has taken so much upon herself, and there’s still so much more to do, and she’ll do it, but right now…well, I can’t blame her for wanting just a few moments to rest.

She had protected many. She had resisted and fought. But this day would still mark one of the greatest disasters in the history of the Aes Sedai.

Can’t think of that, she told herself. Have to focus on what to do to fix things…

You can almost see her all but physically dragging herself out of that beckoning despair. She’s done everything, and still it’s not enough.

She has saved many but what will be remembered is the destruction, and oh, how familiar that sounds. It’s Rand after so many battles, after so much death and pain and people who hate him for tearing nations apart because it’s the only way to save the world. It’s Rand as a figure, hated and feared and yet the world’s hope for salvation. Seen as a monster but demanded as a saviour. It’s the duality not just of salvation and destruction but of perception and reality, of achievement and cost.

She fought and was glorious and still today will be remembered as a disaster, and how easy it would be to give in to that, to let it drag her down, but she can’t and so she pulls herself back up because if she doesn’t, then they are all lost.

She would get up soon. She would lead the novices and Aes Sedai on thse upper floors as they cleaned up and assessed the damage. She would be strong and capable. The others would be tempted to fall into despair, and she needed to be positive. For them.

And for herself. In a moment, she will be the Amyrlin again…

But she could take a few minutes. She just needed to rest for a little while…

And remember a girl named Egwene al’Vere…

Oh, Egwene. You can only do so much alone.

She barely noticed when someone picked her up.

NO. NO NO NO NO NO.

She tiredly opened her eyes, and—thought numb of mind—was astonished to find that she was being carried by Gawyn Trakand.

I DO NOT WANT THIS.

“I’ve got you, Egwene,” he said, glancing down. “I’ll protect you.”

DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHAT SHE HAS DONE? DO YOU? ‘I’ll protect you’ IT’S A LITTLE LATE FOR THAT, SHE’S ALREADY SEEN TO THAT HERSELF. And not just protecting herself but the whole damn Tower. That’s why she’s tired, Gawyn, or hadn’t you noticed? Do you think she just…decided to nap through the battle or have you finally figured it out?

And she doesn’t want to be ‘rescued’ but she’s too tired to say anything and I’m so very indignant on her behalf.

“They just left her there, Siuan,” Gawyn said. His voice was so nice to hear.

IS IT THOUGH? He still assumes she was just…left there. That she did nothing. That she was in need of rescue because of course she couldn’t possible be tired from having basically fought the entire damn battle on her own.

“Defenceless in the hallway! Anyone could have come upon her like that. What if the Seanchan had discovered her?”

WHAT IF

THE SEANCHAN

HAD DISCOVERED HER

I can barely breathe I’m laughing so hard at the wall of unintentional irony upon which I am now going to hit my head repeatedly.

Gawyn you idiot.

Seriously, the degree to which I find it frustrating when characters’ achievements go unrecognised by those around them is entirely proportional to the degree to which I love watching those around them realise or see those achievements. It is possible I am projecting just a little bit here, but I hate it when this happens—when a character does something astonishing but no one who is with them sees or knows or realises, and so they all assume that character is less than they truly are.

I destroyed them, she thought with a smile, thoughts slipping away from her. I was a burning warrior, a hero called by the Horn. They won’t dare face me again.

This contrast here, between his complete lack of even the slightest thought that maybe she was involved—he doesn’t even consider it, just as usual goes straight for the option that accords her the least agency or competence possible, because what more would someone want in a boyfriend—and her unspoken response. The knowledge that the Seanchan sure as hell discovered her, and it was to their grief that they did.

His denial of her competence and her own certainty of it, her own quiet triumph that goes unrecognised by her own strongest allies.

But not by those in the Tower; Saerin realised who she was, and the novices she was with know, and Adelorna was with her. They know what she has done. And Egwene herself knows, and holds to that knowledge.

I like that she gets to have that line, too. That she gets to take pride in what she has done, even if parts of it were terrible, even if she is so tired she can barely think, even if the Tower is broken despite all her efforts. I like that she gets to have that kind of confidence and that she doesn’t have to belittle her accomplishments. Because she was fucking awesome, and she should get to say so.

Called by the Horn is an interesting thought for her to have, by the way.

She distantly heard Siuan’s voice. “What’s this? Light, Egwene! Where did you get this? This is the most powerful one in the Tower!”

“What is it, Siuan?”  Bryne’s voice asked.

“Our way out,” Siuan said distantly.

It’s also really the last puzzle piece you should need, to work out what exactly Egwene’s role in all of this was. Seriously, Siuan, if you and all your political and pattern-finding skill can’t put it together, I’m disappointed. Hm, I wonder what Egwene—who has been given forkroot and so can’t channel strongly—would be doing with the most powerful sa’angreal in the Tower, wearing a white dress and on the same floor of the Tower where Gawyn pointed out a woman throwing fire at the Seanchan. Probably just left ‘defenceless in the hallway’ to have a nap. Yep, sounds about right.

No! Egwene thought, clawing through her drowsiness, forcing her eyes open. I’m winning, don’t you see?

But they don’t see. Because for all that these three are the ones who should believe in you the most strongly—and two of them have shown themselves to be exactly that in the past, by helping you become Amyrlin in truth and acknowledging you as such, and by giving you the army and accepting your true authority—they apparently still see a defenceless prisoner in need of rescue.

It’s especially weird coming from Siuan—enough so that it almost seems out of character—because that’s really not so different from how Egwene appeared, to most, when she was with the rebels. At least until the declaration of war, she gave every outward impression of being the puppet child Amyrlin they wanted, naïve and powerless against the Hall and set up to take the fall if it all went wrong. And Siuan knew how much truth there was to that illusion.

Sigh.

Well, as soon as she wakes up I look forward to her giving them an earful.

And breaking up with Gawyn.

A GIRL CAN DREAM, OKAY?

I must say, though, that this chapter has made excellent use of outsider POV, across its whole range. We’ve had those moments of realisation from those who have seen Egwene, and even from Gawyn and Bryne who didn’t recognise her but were still awed by her, and last chapter from Adelorna who almost immediately understood and accepted her authority. And then we’ve had, too, the misperception of her as helpless, by those who found her after the battle had already been won when she’s too tired to do anything more. It’s a great way of showing the effect perception can have, and it also lends it this…kind of bittersweet sense of extraordinary accomplishment and the awe from characters like Saerin, but also the complete ignorance of characters like Gawyn, who don’t even know what an incredible thing she’s done.

It’s very well done, and such an interesting way to play it, even in the times when it’s INCREDIBLY FRUSTRATING.

All in all, a truly excellent battle. I sort of wondered whether, under Sanderson, the battles would continue in the standard of excellence but each in their own entirely unique way, because it’s something I’ve really, really loved about the series so far. And in this book, at least, that standard has continued.

Anyway, back to Saerin, who is also very tired.

There were a frightful number of dead, including over twenty Aes Sedai so far.

Yeah, I think this might have been what Min’s vision was about, back in TSR. I assumed it was the coup, when that happened, but I don’t think the death toll was nearly so high then. That’s impressive manipulation of foreshadowing and deception, if so.

And also, once again we’re seeing the cost of the victory. They’ve won, but not without a high price.

Saerin has definitely taken command of the administrative side of this battle and its aftermath, and seems to be doing a good job of it. I like it when relatively minor characters get a chance to shine this way.

It also feels like the beginning of…exactly what Tower needs, which is others stepping up to help—well, not just to help Egwene, but to help the Tower itself. To help her help the Tower. She cannot do it all herself, but now there are those who are finally following the example she has tried to set, and the unity she has tried so hard to foster. It’s the beginning of the Tower saving itself.

Where under the Light was Elaida?

Yeah, good question.

Also, where has Alviarin been in all of this? We saw Katerine, but Alviarin’s been conspicuously absent. Where was Mesaana?

Nobody had seen anything of the Amyrlin during the battle

On the contrary, Saerin. Many saw her. The Seanchan certainly did, by the light of the fireballs she was throwing in their faces.

Only three novices in Egwene’s group of over sixty had died? And only one sister out of some forty she had gathered? Ten Seanchan channellers captured, over thirty raken blown from the air? Light! That made Saerin’s own efforts seem downright amateur by comparison. And this was the woman Elaida kept trying to insist was simply a novice?

Salvation and destruction, all in one neat report.

Can you forward that report on to Gawyn and Bryne and Siuan, Saerin?

Oh shit is Elaida dead?

“The entire wall burst in, Saerin Sedai.”

Yeah, walls and rooftops are dangerous enemies in this series.

Oh. Okay. No, Elaida is not dead.

She’s on a raken with an a’dam around her neck.

That’s…uh…

Huh.

I’m not completely sure how I feel about that, actually.

On the one hand, there’s a certain sense of balance to both claimants to the Amyrlin Seat being taken against their will from the Tower at the end of the battle, with none realising until afterwards. In that sense, maybe it’s a way of handing the fate of the Tower to the Hall—Elaida has done her damage and Egwene has done what she can to heal it and now the Tower stands shaken and poised to tip one way or the other and it is up to the Aes Sedai themselves to decide whether the Tower will be saved or destroyed.

On the other hand…what a weird way for Elaida to exit that storyline, after so much has been built up there.

I’ll wait and reserve judgement on this until I see what comes of it, but that’s…an interesting development, for sure.

Also I really, really want to be a fly on the wall when Egwene wakes up.

Next (TGS ch 42) Previous (TGS ch 40)

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Corrupt [1]

Come, oh bearer mine, and show them that even a rose can be deadly.

SERIES: Destiny WORD COUNT: 8,410 SHIP: N/A CHARACTERS: kel, luke, cayde-6, lord shaxx, eris morn, ikora, zavala

He should have been there.

It’s a thought that’s plagued him ever since Luke had returned alone from the Dreadnaught, both of the teammates that had gone with him missing. He’d been frantic and shaking, a far cry from the endlessly optimistic and unapologetically cheerful guardian everyone in the tower knew him for.

It had taken time for them to get him to even speak of what had happened, explain why he was alone—Kel had thought that maybe it was simply a case of the team uncovering something that they desperately needed backup on and Gil had taken the risk of being down one team member to send Luke for that backup.

But it was worse.

They’d been overrun. Whether it had been due to the simple fact they were intruding on Oryx’s turf or that Quinn—font of light herself, so different and enigmatic than her fellows, that she was—had been with them and had drawn the attention of the Taken King, they didn’t know. They’d been boxed in, cornered, and swarmed; first by the Hive and then by Oryx’s Taken.

Luke, somewhat lost in what had happened, had speculated that the assumption that Oryx had taken interest in the tower’s resident anomaly was the correct one—the Taken had immediately zeroed in on her once they’d appeared, attempting to cut her off from them.

They’d pushed, and pushed, and pushed, but they’d begun to run low on ammo and strength.

And now Luke was all that was left.

Quinn, ripped through a portal into another plane of existence and presumably lost to them forever. Gil had sacrificed himself to give Luke enough of an opening to flee and seek help or to simply alert the Vanguard of the mission failure and loss.

It was probably the latter, Kel thinks bitterly. Luke’s ghost, Gibson, had solemnly confirmed that Gil’s light signature had been erased entirely. Quinn’s signature was faint but still there—but too far out of reach for them to help her inasmuch as any of them could figure out.

The Ascendant Plane was a vast expanse of void and they could spend an eternity searching for her within it, but without a point of entry and something to home in on her, it would be ultimately fruitless and a waste of resources to try and search for her. Just pulling an Ascendant soul from one of Oryx’s soldiers and hopping into the void after her wasn’t good enough; with how many guardians they had already lost trying to find Oryx’s throne world and failing, I wasn’t a risk they could take.

Even Cayde had admitted it, pain evident in the utter lack of his usual affable attitude as he did so.

And so it was that Kel was down two teammates, the loss stinging far more than anyone around him could understand. None of them knew of the phantoms that plagued him. None of them knew that this was a loss that only added to the number of ghosts haunting his steps.

A memorial is held.

It’s a short affair because even with as well-known and respected as Gil was among his fellow guardians, even with as quickly as Quinn had wormed her way into their hearts—they’re in the middle of a war on four fronts and they don’t have the time or resources to spare.

It’s rare that any lost guardian winds up with a memorial service, but Gil was tantamount to a hero within City walls, having fought at the sides of the Vanguard members hundreds of years past. Defending the walls as they were built and holding off the siege of the Fallen at Six Fronts, saving lives at the battle of Twilight Gap, respected mentor alongside Shaxx to newly risen guardians for many, many years.

He was one of the best guardians the City probably ever had or will have, and as a result a decently large crowd gathers to show their respect.

He was gruff and abrasive, but loved and respected.

Yet still only moments after saying their solemn farewells, Cayde and Ikora are already leaving the plaza discussing the next step in the war against the Taken King. Zavala paces a few steps ahead of them, looking a fair bit more solemn than usual, as they all retreat for the Vanguard hall.

Kel’s fairly certain Cayde is trying to find some way to rescue Quinn on the side of his work, but Kel had heard of Toland the Shattered, and he doesn’t hold out hope.

The loss hurts them all, but the Vanguard has already moved on and before long Kel is the only one left standing in the plaza, for the first time in centuries feeling the prickling sensation of being overwhelmed by the mere presence of others.

None of them have time to mourn. To truly mourn. Humanity has clung to the tails of survival for thousands of years, and mourning the loss of a single guardian was a luxury they couldn’t afford. Not even for Gil, and certainly not for one that had only been a presence for under a decade.

Kel leaves the City.

He vanishes because he’s tired of the condolences from the older guardians that knew him as the hero that always fought at Gil’s side, at his friend’s side, and the apartment the team shared is too quiet with both him and Quinn gone and with Luke as withdrawn as he’s become.

The silence is driving him mad and it’s a feeling he’s unfamiliar with. Silence had been his balm for so long that Kel couldn’t begin to pinpoint the place in time that he’d grown fond of having a team at his back—at hearing Quinn and Luke’s cheerful laughter and jokes as they checked off another victory for Fireteam Ward, at Gil’s fond looks when he thought no one was looking, at how his ghosts were silenced when he sat down in quiet solidarity with Quinn who struggled to hear her ghosts.

He leaves for the wilds and it’s the first time he’s been on his own for nearly two centuries. Kel can’t decide if he hates the sudden isolation or the fact that Gil had convinced him to be part of a team in the first place more.

In the first week he skirts the plaguelands, takes down half a dozen groups of Fallen holed up just within its borders. He feels empty. Nothing.

In the second he tears a bloody path through the Cosmodrome, clearing out Rasputin’s bunker (just in case) and wreaking havoc on the forces of Hive as pure vengeance for what they’d wrought on his team. Still, nothing.

By the third week he hesitantly makes his way to the final battleground of Twilight Gap, the memories of fighting by his old friend’s side and the few, rare laughs Kel had ever had after being resurrected making him want to raze the entire memorial to the ground. He doesn’t have the raw power of a Titan or the capability for devastation like a Warlock, so he makes do with firing a few rockets at the creaking and rusted artillery and watches them tumble down the cliffs with a numb disinterest.

Echo stopped trying to speak with him after the first week, instead opting to ping messages onto his heads-up display whenever Luke tried to contact him or the Vanguard attempted to deliver updates or request missions he was in the area for. Cayde confirms Kel’s theory that he’d been researching for the purpose of hunting Quinn by sending him updates on said research.

He’s not feeling particularly endeared to the Vanguard these days and he disregards both the updates and the assignments. Quinn was gone just as assuredly as Gil was gone and he wasn’t about to get his hopes up.

He’d had enough loss. In both of his lives.

He had no reason to return to the City. None.

Uncharted territory is where he finds himself by the end of the third week, somewhere across the sea as he sought even more distance from the place he’d so foolishly called home for the last few hundred years. He doesn’t have a clue what he’s looking for or why he’s looking for it, but there’s an indescribable pull that’s carving his path as he treks through the ravines and forests by foot.

He wonders if it’s a Hunter instinct or just a Kel instinct—or something else entirely.

He comes upon a swathe of ruins nearly reclaimed by nature, evidence of a post-Collapse civilization making itself known in the form of ancient buildings rebuilt with scrap and anything the people back then could pull together for shelter. It was empty, a ghost town with some kind of dangerous heaviness settled thick enough to choke over it.

Something happened here. Something tantamount to cataclysmic that had nothing to do with the onset of the Collapse. Something final.

He can see a pair of massive Hive seeds, one crashed through an old, rotting building and another cracking up through what remains of a paved street. Only a pair, and he can’t see any telltale signs of the Hive repurposing the area for their own gain—just an isolated group, then, lingering to feed on the remaining light and darkness trapped within the energy of the place before they moved on.

A pair of Knights notice him.

Kel stands there as they roar and open fire on him, the glow of the heated weapons the Hive used reflecting in his visor as they paint a violent slash of color through the air towards him.

He considers not moving. He truly does—considers not moving, ordering his ghost to abandon him and to head back to the tower without him.

She chirps at him in alarm, as vocal as she’s been in weeks.

Kel knows that’s not how it works. He’s seen the ghost shells, broken and forlorn, scattered along the coasts and ruins of pre-Collapse civilization. Their light had run out before they could find their guardian, or they’d been attacked and damaged by the monsters that saw the little creatures as a light-filled treat to feast on. Or they’d simply given up.

He may feel like one of those broken and empty shells, but he won’t suffer Echo the same fate. She was perhaps the one thing he thought he had left that he wouldn’t forsake like that.

Kel dives, feels the heat of the bolts of Hive fire boil the air where he’d been standing seconds ago; he wonders if his cloak, already ripped and worn from hundreds of years of battle and survival, had been singed by the close call. Whirling into action his auto rifle coughs out bullets as fast as he can aim and pull the trigger.

His shields drop far enough that he’s forced to seek cover, slipping under a broken garage door and into one of the ramshackle buildings lining the ruined street. The Knights and Thrall howl for his blood and light, seeking him as he slips away from them.

He finds a place to recuperate, eyes slipping to the indicator Echo provides for him for the status of his shields as he reloads. Once it blinks and disappears he leaves the building, sweeping the new street slowly and carefully. He can still hear the Hive somewhere around the corner, unaware of his presence.

Good—he can flank them.

As his eyes sweep the other direction he freezes, taking in the sight of a body slumped there before him. Bones, nothing but dust and rags, and Kel would have mistaken it for any poor soul lost when this settlement had been overrun or abandoned—but Echo makes a noise of surprise, telling him that there’s the faintest signature of light emanating from these bones.

Light that felt…different.

Next to the body rests a gun. Revolver. Custom. It looks like it had been warped, swallowed alive by something dark and vile and spat back out; black and sharp and sickly green, and though it must have been abandoned for decades if not longer and was partially covered by growing weeds and grass it looks as though it had been sitting there for just a few days.

It pulses with dark green light almost eagerly. Almost like it had been waiting for him to stumble upon it and it was happy he was here. And there, again, was the pull he had been feeling. The pull that had led him here.

Shouldering his rifle Kel kneels and digs the handgun out from the weeds grasping at it, wrapping his fingers around the grip of the handgun and hefting it lightly to test its balance.

Echo makes a noise of disapproval as though telling him to leave it.

Kel looks up from the body before him and sees a little girl with blonde curls and a pink dress standing on the opposite side of the street staring at him with unblinking, bright blue eyes. He goes rigid. When he blinks, the little girl vanishes.

His grip tightens on the handgun and he brushes the unbidden vision aside at the same time something whispers in his head.

My name is Thorn, oh bearer mine I will bring ruin to those who wronged you.

This, too, he brushes aside; it isn’t the first time he’s dealt with whispers and shadows in the back of his mind and vision, and he knows this is no different. A lot is on his mind and he hasn’t been sleeping well.

Just hallucinations. Nothing more.

Shaking his head, Kel turns away from the sun-bleached bones of the poor soul whose name he’ll never know.

When he returns to finish off the Hive still clawing at the door he’d vanished through the bullets that bite through their chitinous forms comes from a vile handgun that purrs at the back of his mind, pleased with the carnage and the way the Hive corrode and collapse under the gun’s fire.

He feels ill.

It’s the first thing he’s felt since his brother in arms died.

When he returns to the tower, Kel thinks he shouldn’t have come back at all.

He has no idea what even drove him to come back, but the way people greet him with concern and ask him how he’s doing as though he weren’t just an empty shell who remembers too much feels too much hurts too much, or greet him as though nothing has changed, it grates on his already frayed nerves. As though his best friend isn’t dead, as though he cares for their idle chatter and words.

When he blinks stonily at them, knowing they can’t see his eyes, he stares until they get uncomfortable and turn away. He sees the little blonde girl with curls and a pretty dress staring back at him when they move out of the way.

They don’t see her. It’s been hundreds of years since he has.

Kel makes his way to the Vanguard hall, feels Eris Morn’s three stolen eyes burn into his back and Shaxx’s sharp gaze follow him as he passes, and when he moves down the steps towards the Vanguard’s war table all three members stop to stare at him.

He doesn’t bother to address it, though he feels his skin crawl with frustration at the response.

Moving to stand in front of Cayde—why was he still here, if he was so sure Quinn was still alive? Why wasn’t he actually doing anything? It’s been a month, is she dead?—as though the wary, concerned looks from the other two weren’t making a deep anger he hasn’t felt in years stir inside him.

“Been gone a long time, guardian,” Cayde drawls, one hand still resting idly on his maps and papers spread in front of him. Kel supposes that when you’re on the brink of extinction and fighting an impossible war, a month could be considered a long time. “What’d you find?”

Everyone knows about the Dare. Everyone knows how Cayde-6 became Hunter Vanguard.

Andal Brask had been a good man.

The whispering and aggravation at the back of his mind quiets with relief that Cayde, at least, seems to understand the desire to avoid speaking of the dead and lost. “Mapped out some territory.” Kel replies evenly; in his periphery he can see the way Zavala shifts in irritation.

No ventures into dark zones without fireteams. Ever.

Cayde however steps to one side and gestures to the archaic map he has spread across the table. “Show me.”

So Kel does, pointing to parts of the map and indicating where he found a Fallen Ketch docked, or Hive seeds—that old city in the dark zone he had combed through. Explains what he saw and what he thinks of it, what might be going on or whether it was worth looking into further.

He does this not because it’s his duty to but because something pulled him back to the City just as it had pulled him away, and without the friend that had been helping to guide him for centuries Kel has fallen back into that old Hunter habit of following the paths that call to him. He’s not sure what it was or why, so for now he’s simply going through the familiar motions he’d gotten used to while working as part of a fireteam even though it no longer felt like he had one.

When he finally looks up from the map, done with recounting his travels, he freezes as his eyes land once more on the little girl, standing on the other side of the table and seemingly standing on her toes to try and reach up for Ikora’s ghost.

“Was that all you found?” Cayde asks. Kel hears the caution in it, the double meaning, and understands Cayde’s intent for asking it.

The little girl looks towards the entrance of the hall and Kel follows her gaze. Standing there is Luke, halfway down the steps and staring at him. Kel’s fingers twitch in search for the handgun he’d found.

He blinks. The little girl vanishes. “Yes. That was all I found.”

Without waiting for confirmation, Kel turns away from the table and heads for the stairs at a pace that could just barely be considered a rush, his shoulder bumping against Luke’s roughly and nearly knocking the Warlock off-balance.

Luke tries to say something to him as he leaves, but the whispering is back and Luke’s voice is lost somewhere in the red-hot static boiling in Kel’s veins. He’s close to the burning fire of a Golden Gun let loose and Kel knows that if he doesn’t leave the hall behind, that Golden Gun will be turned on Luke.

Much as something dark and hateful clamors for that exact thing, Kel doesn’t want it.

Maybe if he says it enough he’ll convince himself.

It’s as he reaches the steps to ascend into the plaza that Eris finally decides to insert herself in his way, stopping him and sidestepping to block him every time he tries to move around her. “You found one.”

“I found a few ‘ones’ while out there.” Kel replies, irritated. Another step to the side, blocked again by the woman warped by darkness and Hive, teetering somewhere between the Dark and the Light and leaving his skin crawling—something he’s never felt in her presence before. “Be more specific or get out of my way.”

“It’s whispering to you.” She says, her gauze-covered eyes glowing through the thin fabric and dripping with ichor focused intently on his face as though she could catch his own eyes through his visor. And maybe she could. “I can hear it, too. Where did you find it?”

Shaxx is watching the exchange from further back in the hall.

Kel doesn’t answer, still blocked from moving forward, and he’s tempted to shove her aside as he had done with Luke; he hasn’t felt this openly aggressive in a long time but he’s falling back into it easily as though he’d never stopped.

It felt good. It takes all his willpower to ignore the urge.

“A sorrowful weapon, bleak and dripping with carnage and hate. What does it promise you? Does it promise you vengeance? Purpose? Freedom? They are all lies. You will find no true answers from its treacherous mouth, guardian.” Her voice is thick with spite and venom, growing thicker with every word, and it occurs to Kel that he’s never heard Eris so emotive before.

Ironic, considering his own behavior.

The little girl is back, pouting up at her with furrowed brows.

I promise you solace, oh bearer mine. I promise you certainty.

His lips twitch. More hallucinations. He’ll feel better once he’s gotten some rest—that’s all he needs.

“It speaks to you now,” Eris breathes, her fingers curling around the gently glowing soul stone she carries and her lips pull back in a feral snarl, “do not listen to it! It is hungry and it lies.”

I promise you vindication. I promise you vengeance. All that exists struggles to exist. Blade versus flesh. Blade versus eternity. You know this. You have seen it. You have suffered it. In death and in Life.

My name is Thorn, and I promise you the power to continue existing.

Kel’s skin crawls with illness again, and something soot-blackened and dark and full of sickeningly sweet comfort curls claws around his thoughts; he gives in to his urge and finally pushes past Eris Morn with her haunting call following his rapidly retreating form.

“Do not lose yourself, guardian! Your light yet burns!”

He enters the Crucible at Shaxx’s insistence. He represents no faction, plays with those far from lacking in skill; game of choice is Rumble. He still doesn’t feel like playing as part of a team, not when what was left of his was the one responsible for the other half being lost.

Shaxx says it’ll clear his head, get his mind focused forward instead of stuck in the past. Stuck on events that couldn’t be changed.

He indulges in his old friend’s suggestion, not because he thinks it’ll clear his head (it won’t) but because a deep, darkened part of his soul craves the mind-numbing violence he’s dirtied his boots with for centuries, craves the ability to let loose, put his anger and emptiness outward rather than holding it in for a change.

He wants blood. Wants to see the light bleed from his peers as he shows them how far from his level they are, to prove to them and himself that if he had been on that mission in the Dreadnaught—

He shakes his head and steps around a corner with his auto rifle at the ready, firing a hail of bullets into the back of an unprepared Warlock. The Warlock’s ghost blinks at him balefully, facets spreading around the glowing orb of light that represented the creature’s light and life as it works on reviving its guardian.

The only reason Kel doesn’t glare back at it is because he’s at the top of the scoreboard and doesn’t have the time nor the care.

He’s leaps and bounds ahead of the other participants and on a killstreak, much to Shaxx’s delight, and it’s likely why the other participants seemed to have abandoned their crosshairs being aimed at each other and instead pointed them all in his direction.

He didn’t mind. It just gave him more chance to prove his skill.

He normally didn’t enjoy the Crucible, caring only for its ability to hone team coordination and personal skill—but now, now he was enjoying it. He can’t point to what changed, but he can’t say it was a bad one.

It was…thrilling, he supposed. It made him feel alive.

He ducks under a natural archway in the Venusian landscape, glancing at the radar in his HUD.

He sees the flash of red on his radar a split second too late; something solid slams into his side and he just barely catches himself before it throws him from his feet and knocks him prone. His rifle isn’t so lucky—it goes flying out of his hands, sliding to a halt a few yards away.

The Titan that had slammed into him gives him no time to recover, closing the small distance his shoulder charge had created and snapping an elbow into Kel’s helmet before he can block it. The strike leaves a nasty ringing in his ears and this finally throws him off-balance and his knee brushes the ground.

Kel tips over and rolls with the motion away from the Titan, ignoring the vertigo the action causes. He hears a shotgun round rip through the air, lodging into the course gravel of the landscape he’d just vacated.

He bounds away from the Titan, using a pulse of his light to propel himself further with a jump—another shotgun blast shatters his shields and Echo beeps a sharp warning at him as he retreats.

Somewhere in the scattered rocks and Vex monoliths in the arena he loses the Titan and he circles back around to where he’d dropped his rifle with Echo’s assistance; the Titan had the same idea as soon as he’d lost sight of him, apparently, and Kel is forced to duck back under cover when he appears in sight, booted feet planting firmly on the ground right next to the rifle.

He was waiting.

Kel’s shields had recovered, but that shotgun had a quick firing rate and it would bite through them faster than he’d be able to grab his gun and take the Titan down. The moment he got within range, if the first shot didn’t knock him out of the running the second would, and Kel would still have to aim and fire.

Point blank range or not, rifles didn’t have the same kind of close-range stopping power.

He needed to think of something fast. It wouldn’t be long before the other combatants caught up to them and joined the fray, and Kel didn’t hold out hope that they’d end their grudge and go after each other rather than eliminate the one in first place and then return to the regular slaughter.

The handgun he’d found. It was still in his inventory—

He grimaces. No, he’s got a solar-fueled grenade ready and a throwing knife still on his belt, he could make use of those.

But—

Fingers twitching, Kel orders Echo to summon the hand cannon, spins out of cover, and takes aim.

The first shot knocks out most of the Titan’s shields, and something sick and corrosive eats away at the rest before he even fires a second time; Kel frowns. When he fires again the shot snaps through the Titan’s helmet and he drops like a stone, the heavy thud drowned out by Shaxx calling an end to the match.

He thought there’d been at least another minute left on the timer and he frowns at the empty HUD on his visor. Had he reached the point cap? Why was the Titan’s ghost not visible and working on a revive?

His ghost is quiet.

He’s won either way and he decides it doesn’t matter much. Leisurely and with a heavy exhale he moves to retrieve his auto rifle; considering it for a moment, he glances at the jagged thorn of a weapon in his other hand. Echo chirps her disapproval in his ear, but obediently stows the rifle and transmats a holster onto his thigh for the hand cannon.

Kel returns to the tower to see if there are any open bounties on the board in the plaza. He may as well go out and do his duty to the City while he got used to the new weapon.

He’d been wrong—the match had helped him feel better.

You are strong. The rest are weak. You need to show them. This is the way it should be. This is the way it is.

The whispers are getting louder. Clearer. More insistent. Something about this one in particular gives him pause, but when he tries to grasp the cause it slips through his fingers like sand. He dismisses it, thumbing the grip of the gun holstered on his thigh.

He’s been dealing with the hallucinations for hundreds of years. They’d gotten worse after Demi’s death. They were worse now, after losing Gil. He knows what to expect.

They’ll fade with time. They always do.

When Kel approaches the war room a few days later it’s much louder than he ever remembers it being; their voices are at a volume that he can hear, indistinct and muffled, as far back as the stairs Eris liked to hover by.

Her typical haunt is devoid of her heavy presence.

Shaxx, too, is absent from his usual spot in the Vanguard hall, the space conspicuously and unnervingly empty with the large Titan and his even larger energy gone.

Kel’s footsteps pause momentarily when he catches Arcite, Shaxx’s quartermaster frame, staring at him. He stares back wordlessly until the frame returns to work, muttering in displeasure at whatever messages it’s receiving from the various factions invested in the upcoming Crucible season.

And then he notices the war room’s doors are closed.

It’s an unfamiliar sight—Kel can only recall one time in his hundreds of years of undeath that those doors had ever closed: the crisis on the moon. Humanity’s first contact and war with the Hive, and the First Fireteam to have descended into the Hellmouth. The Vanguard had always adopted an open-door policy from its formation to the modern day, and he wonders what kind of cataclysm must have occurred to force them to close their doors to discuss it.

Did the new war with the Taken warrant such a closed-door meeting?

Kel resumes his walk to the door and pauses just before it, the voices beyond still muffled but more distinct now.

“—he’s not fit for active duty. Is that what you’re saying, Shaxx?” Zavala asks.

Shaxx’s voice, easily the loudest in the room as was the norm for the Titan, answers with a kind of fury Kel hasn’t heard in many years. “I’m saying he’s not fit to be within the City walls, much less on active duty or participating with either the skilled or the under-trained in my Crucible.”

“May I remind you, Lord Shaxx, that you are the one that invited him to participate in that match in the first place.” Ikora says calmly.

“I don’t need to be reminded!” Shaxx responds, the statement punctuated by what sounds like a fist slamming down onto a solid surface. “Had I any idea that he had a weapon that could cause true death, I never would have! Do you think I would ever willingly invite another Red Death incident?”

There’s a heavy beat of silence and Kel’s frown deepens; he remembers the incident well. Everyone had heard of it. Everyone had talked about it. A small massacre caused by a gun prototype found in the wild whose designs had immediately been confiscated and destroyed.

“Don’t think that’s what Ikora was saying, Shaxx,” he hears Cayde’s voice, a parallel to Ikora’s in its even calm—rare, for the typically aloof and jovial hunter, “none of us want a repeat of that.”

“So what is it you’re suggesting, Shaxx? Banishment is a heavy punishment, and what happened could have been an accident.” Zavala, again, now sounding uneasy.

No one had been banished from the City since Osiris—and he, as far as Kel was aware, was one of only two in the history of the City that had ever suffered such a punishment. It was far from a light punishment to consider.

Who the hell was the subject of their conversation?

The next voice that speaks up catches Kel off guard and sends a wave of anger roiling through him, his fists clenching at his sides. “Why is banishment even on the table? He’s just—he’s just messed up from what happened, right? He couldn’t have meant it.” Within the same sentence Luke’s tone wavers between desperately upset to insistent. “He just needs time—”

“To kill more guardians?” Shaxx demands, voice rising another level in volume. “Absolutely not. I will not have more deaths in my Crucible, and I refuse to simply ignore a threat to guardians outside of it either.”

Zavala’s responding tone is sharp and unyielding, a reminder to Shaxx that though he was a valued voice to the Vanguard he wasn’t in a place to state what he just had. “This isn’t a decision for you to make on your own, Lord Shaxx. It will be brought to the Consensus, and it’s why we’re having this discussion in the first place.”

Something is purring at the back of his mind again and Kel glances down at the hand cannon strapped to his thigh. If he believed in weapons with personalities (just tools. Just dead things. just like guardians.) then he might have believed it enjoyed all this heightened emotion.

Whether or not Shaxx intended to respond to Zavala’s warning, Cayde interrupts them both—Kel wonders if it’s to attempt to diffuse the argument before it grew violent. “You said he was usin’ a new gun, Shaxx.” His voice is again eerily calm and even. It’s rare that Cayde was the level-headed one out of the three. “What did it look like?”

“Hand cannon.” Shaxx huffs, either cowed by Zavala or sufficiently distracted by the topic change. “Black and green. Sharp ridges along the barrel, glowing between the seams. It looked sick. Vile. Like the Darkness itself spat it out.”

Kel realizes, then, that they’re talking about him.

“You got a recording of it?”

“I did.”

“Show me.”

Silence follows and Kel twitches impatiently, agitated.

Eyes are on his back again; when he turns around, Arcite’s glowing, unblinking eyes are once again burning holes into him. It’s only because he doesn’t want to alert the people inside the war room to his presence that he doesn’t demand the frame minds its own business.

Bristling, Kel ignores it.

“What is that?” Ikora breathes, so quiet Kel almost misses it.

“Thorn,” Is Cayde’s simple, assured response. His voice is so caustic that it shocks him—he’s never heard the Exo sound so full of raw hatred.

“You can’t be serious, Cayde,” Ikora says. “Dredgen Yor vanished centuries ago—no one knows what happened to him, what are the chances that the fabled weapon none of us could ever confirm even existed shows up in the hands of one of our own?”

He knows that name. Like with the Red Death incident, every guardian does—but unlike Red Death, no one knew the story behind the hushed way it was mentioned, only that it was as feared as any of the enemies they faced in the wilds.

“Tell me, Ikora,” Cayde replies, “where did the fables come from? That gun’s as real as the one that killed its owner and the man that wields it. And that—that is Thorn. That’s the gun that killed Pahanin and Jaren Ward. The one that killed dozens more guardians before ‘em.”

Zavala sounds unconvinced. “And you know this for a fact?”

“I do.”

“And you never brought this anonymous guardian up or the connection of Pahanin’s and Jared Ward’s disappearances to us why?”

“Ain’t a guardian, just a man with a Golden Gun.” Cayde corrects Ikora, clearly unconcerned with either her or Zavala’s skepticism. “And the man likes his privacy, doesn’t want anything to do with our politics. It doesn’t matter. What matters is Thorn’s on our doorstep, a guardian killer, in the hands of a troubled guardian that ain’t thinkin’ clearly.”

The whispering at the back of Kel’s head intensifies, almost a hissing. He finds his lips pulling back in a snarl; he wasn’t troubled, and the gun he had found was just that—a gun. What vile deeds may or may not have been performed with it didn’t change the fact that it was nothing but a tool.

“Hunger…it is hungry. It has been so long and he is so angry…” Eris mutters from somewhere within; he has to lean forward to hear her clearly.

His snarl turns into a sneer; Eris Morn saw evil in everything, and he doesn’t find it hard to believe that she’s simply projecting her losses onto everything she can. Damn the truth, the Hive had warped her and her thoughts, twisted her into something that straddled the line between the Light and the Dark.

How the Vanguard could see her opinion as credible was beyond him.

But a stray thought occurs to him and briefly stifles his building anger—hadn’t she lost her friends and allies in the Hellmouth? Hadn’t she suffered the same painful loss he had?

“So we force him to turn it over and we destroy it.” Zavala says after a heavy pause as they all considered Eris’s words. “And we take him off active duty until his head is cleared.”

Static washes through his thoughts and swats aside the thought that gave him pause, replacing it with that same wash of tidal rage. His fists curl even tighter and he feels his light spark with electricity rather than warm flame for the first time in centuries.

The whispers, the hissing, the hallucinations crescendo into a near roar between his ears, insistent and angry. He feels fingers wrap around his palm and looks down.

The little girl with blonde curls and bright, open blue eyes stares up at him. Her mouth doesn’t move but he can hear her speaking to him, the voice so familiar but distant from his memories. Indistinct, but clear enough that he knows it’s her.

They don’t understand, oh father mine. You are strong. That guardian was weak. This universe eats the weak. You could make them understand. All of them. Do you understand?

He should be afraid. He should be terrified. He killed someone, whether intentionally or not. He killed a fellow guardian when there were already such a small number of them compared to the innumerable enemies they faced.

Deep down, he feels that terror mixing with the anger and the ill feeling that had overcome him when he first found the weapon.

A dark undercurrent accompanies his long-lost daughter’s voice when she wordlessly speaks again.

Teach them, oh father mine. Start with the one who wronged you.

Everything else is drowned out by the roaring in his mind, a cold grasp of fury urging him to finally step forward and shove the doors to the war room open.

Shaxx is next to Ikora, both closest to the doors, and Zavala is on the other end of the long table. Eris is apart from the group, halfway between Cayde and Zavala. Cayde stands in his usual place in front of his maps and in the middle of the table.

Luke is next to him.

All eyes are on Kel. Wary, guarded, surprised—and in Cayde’s case, uncharacteristically empty.

His movements careful and measured, Kel moves down the steps towards them and if he realizes that his little girl’s fingers have become the solid grip of a black hand cannon, he doesn’t acknowledge it. “My head is cleared.” He snaps. “If anyone needs to be taken off active duty, it’s him.”

If Kel had been there instead of Luke, Gil would still be there. Quinn wouldn’t be gone. Luke wasn’t fit to be in the field, on a team, responsible for the lives of his fellow guardians. Gil had taken him under his wing and now Gil was dead.

Luke blinks at the open aggression Kel willingly displays, eyebrows lifting in confusion. “…Me?”

Though his eyes are settled rigidly on Luke, Kel is aware that everyone’s attention is on him. Save for Cayde, who has turned away from him and is leaning with his palms flat on the table and eyes focused but unseeing on the maps under them, everyone in the room is ready to intervene, ready to stop him.

From what?

Shaxx’s fury would make anyone else buckle under the weight of it, but not Kel. He knows Shaxx, has known him for hundreds of years, and though he’s not fool enough to underestimate the Titan nor holds any belief that he could square off against him in a fair fight Kel isn’t afraid of the man.

He doesn’t fear anyone in this room—fears utterly nothing he can recall.

He had been there during the Collapse a lifetime ago. Nothing had frightened him since.

Luke shifts uncomfortably under Kel’s malevolent, heavy stare, shuffling slightly back and away from him even though Kel stops several feet away. Then he freezes and recognition dawns in his eyes, followed by pain and resignation. “Kel, if this is about Gil—”

His shoulder twitches as though he were going to draw up his gun and fire. Right into Luke’s skull. It would only take two shots. Just two. “Don’t.”

“I did what I could! He told me to r—”

Kel disappears in a blink and reappears right next to Luke, ozone tinting the air in the room from the crackle of arc energy; he spins and wraps his fingers around Luke’s throat, forcing him back against the surface of the table and cutting off his protest.

Thorn snaps up from where it had rested uneasily at his hip, barrel settling firmly against the Warlock’s forehead.

He doesn’t flinch when the sound of weapons readying around the room reaches his ears. Neither Cayde nor Eris has moved, but everyone else now had a gun trained on him.

“You ran, right? You’re a coward that let him die.” His voice is frigid. The green light under Thorn’s twisted frame pulses as though eager.

“There was an army of Taken, Kel. They took Quinn, I couldn’t—”

He pulls the hammer back on his hand cannon with a click that firmly and finally silences his teammate.

Cayde speaks up, then, calm despite the scene occurring right next to him. “Eris, that thing’s evil I take it?”

Her responds is a plagued, dreadful moan. “Fingers in my brain.”

“Right.” Cayde moves so fast, then, that Kel doesn’t even see it happen; his head tips to one side when the barrel of Cayde’s Ace of Spades is pressed to the side of his helmet. When the Exo speaks again, eyes unwavering from Kel, it’s directed to the others in the hall. “Rest of you ‘cept for Eris, leave for just a minute. And yes, Zavala, that means you.”

No one moves immediately. Ikora is the first to nod in acceptance and turn to leave, Zavala following after. Shaxx takes the longest to abide the request but he goes as well, shutting the war room’s doors behind him.

Cayde waits for a beat before speaking again. “Let him go, guardian.”

Kel doesn’t take his eyes off Luke. “No.” His finger is on the trigger. The whispering has grown into a hum, some kind of dreadfully beautiful melody, one that calls for him to finish it—to let it consume the light of the traitor standing in front of him.

The urge gnaws at the gray matter of his brain, the undead cells of his body given new life by the Traveler. It burns through his every nerve and his fingers are curled so tightly around the gun’s grip that it’s nearly painful.

He is weak. You are strong. Show them the law and the Logic. Show them the truth.

He wants to. Kel wants to. Luke had left Gil to die—Gil, the man that had considered the young Warlock something of a son, the man Kel had considered his closest friend and brother in arms for hundreds of years. It was Luke’s fault that Gil was dead, Luke’s fault that Quinn was gone. The loss of Demi had been decades ago, around the same time Luke had joined the team, and Kel knows it must have been his fault, too.

Their team had shrunk from five to two. It was his fault.

Wasn’t it?

It was only fair. Put a bullet in his skull. Vengeance. Vindication. Not just for Demi and Quinn and Gil, but also for the wife and daughter Kel shouldn’t even remember. For the rebirth he had never asked for and the war he never wanted to fight.

If he did, Cayde wouldn’t hesitate to put him down. He knew this; rare as it was, Cayde was every bit the leader Zavala and Ikora were, no matter how much he denied it and claimed he wasn’t cut out for the station he’d fallen into. He knew when to be merciful, and he knew exactly when to show no mercy.

Echo wouldn’t be allowed to revive him—she’d be stopped if she tried to. It would be a true death, one Kel wouldn’t be able to come back from just like the Titan he had unwittingly killed in the Crucible, just like Luke should he pull the trigger.

Death upon death upon death.

His blood chills as he finally recognizes the hum at the back of his mind, the words indistinct through the roaring of whispers and demands and promises but no less familiar in their finality.

It was a lure to release—to freedom from an endless existence of nothing but loss and pain, from an existence he had never asked for and a return to the peaceful silence of death and to the ghosts had he left behind in his first life. Freedom from the Traveler’s war and the losing, hopeless battle they’d all been forced into fighting.

But it wasn’t a hopeless fight. Though it seemed that way so often that it was hard to see otherwise, there was a difference between a lost cause and a hopeless one, and the difference was in keeping that hope alive long enough to turn to the tide.

Gil wouldn’t have ordered Luke to flee the battle if he didn’t think there was a chance to turn that tide. Kel knew his friend too well to think that he didn’t.

He knew the difference. Why had it taken Kel so long to see the difference himself?

He feels a phantom tug on the hem of his cloak, sees the little girl in the edge of his vision, and he grits his teeth. The hand holding Thorn suddenly begins to shake, nearly imperceptibly. Was it from rage? Or was he more afraid than he was willing to admit to himself?

“You aren’t the first guardian to lose a partner, hunter.” Cayde’s voice is still calm and even but filled with the kind of tranquil fury that the Hunter Vanguard hid behind jokes and good humor. A calculated coldness that only a handful of other guardians that knew him had ever seen or heard.

He hears the click of Cayde dropping the hammer on Ace, just as Kel had moments ago. “Last chance. Put it down.”

Kel doesn’t move, and it takes him a long moment to get any words out. “Is Quinn still alive?” He asks. His jaw grinds and he tells himself to focus on something else, anything else, other than the scratching in his skull telling him how much easier it would be to just pull the trigger and finish it. It’s not his own.

The ghost wearing his daughter’s face was no hallucination anymore. It was a gun, and it was hungry.

If the question catches Cayde off guard it doesn’t show. “I know she is.”

He still doesn’t move. Kel stares at Luke for one, two, three heartbeats; Luke stares back and it’s the solemn acceptance in his face that eventually breaks the spell Kel could now see being cast. Luke blamed himself for the team’s loss.

Finally he drops Thorn to his side and steps back, releasing Luke from his hold.

Cayde lowers his gun as well but doesn’t holster it. His gaze is unblinking. “Gimme the gun, guardian. So that we can get you back out there.” He says, a little bit more of his usual warmth back in his voice.

Kel ignores him and instead turns to Eris. Surprisingly, she’s looking back like she had expected him to. “Is there a way to shut it up?” He asks.

“Sever the bond.” She says, but as he turns away she adds: “Hive magic warped that weapon, and it has been soaked in countless deaths and drank the light of many. It will never be clean. Never be silenced. And you will listen to it.”

He stares at her, and it takes him a moment to understand what she truly meant—not that should he hold onto the weapon it’ll eventually take full hold of him, but that if he ever underestimated it, it would succeed in dragging him into the same kind of end Dredgen Yor must have suffered.

He looks at Cayde, then, both of them quiet in light of Eris’s words. Cayde seems to pick up on the fact that Kel had no intention of turning the gun over, finally holstering Ace and stepping back.

Kel briefly considers asking Eris if the gun could be destroyed as Zavala had suggested earlier but he decides against it. He won’t take that risk, not with knowing how quickly and easily Thorn had gotten into his head, even considering how poorly he responded to Gil’s death.

Even now, he could hear it howling in rage at his denial of it. Hear it demanding that he pull the trigger, finish the job, let it consume the light of Luke and Eris and Cayde and feed whatever dark magic powered it.

One thing was for certain: he couldn’t trust himself within the City’s walls so long as he held onto it.

He mutes his helmet comms long enough to tell Echo to ready his ship for transmat, and then he holsters Thorn back into place on his thigh, meeting Cayde’s gaze and ignoring Luke’s confused stare. “Contact me when you plan to get her back.” He says.

The engines of his ship roar as it flies over the tower and Echo transmats him into its confines before he hears Cayde’s response.

He leaves the City behind again—this time, somehow, with an even heavier heart than before.

[worldwalkernovel]

Atlas

A snippet of Brenneth and Crispin’s first time in Alleirat, age 20.

It had been four days since Brenneth left the gothkenla of Dase, sword in hand and dread in her heart, for the forest.  

It had been four and a half days since she had seen Crispin, walking out of her smithy without looking back while she stared after him in something that surpassed shock and horror into a numbness she didn’t have words for.  She had stood there, frozen, feeling the memory of his hands in hers, for what felt like a small eternity.  It had been, she learned later, nearly an hour of precious time.

When she had been able to move without crumpling onto the floor, she had grabbed up her sword and a lantern and sprinted for the scholar’s quarter as the clear night began to cloud over with thunderheads.

Brenneth was not, and had never been, strictly speaking allowed in the scholar’s quarter, as far as Crispin’s teachers were concerned. She was a bad influence, combative and impulsive and undiplomatic.  But she knew her way around, because, until she had her own smithy, she had broken in more than once.  

She didn’t have to go any farther than the great hall on the bottom floor of the teachers’ tower.  The room was ruined, cracked scars writhing up the walls with marks of char where tapestries and other ornamentation had burst into flames, the glowglasses dark and shattered with glass littering the floor. The air still tasted like ozone—ozone and something else, something heavy and acrid that left something slick on Brenneth’s lips.

The bodies on the floor were badly burned, one of them charred almost to the bone in places, but recognizable.

Brenneth licked her lips automatically, waiting for the roll of nausea to break through the numb layer of fog cloaking her mind, but it never came.

“All right,” she said, and her voice was a stranger’s, the vibration in her throat so far away she couldn’t even feel it.  Somewhere, locked carefully into the farthest back of her mind, a child was screaming, the hollow tearful wail of a little girl lost in a wide and frightening new world, all alone.  “All right.”

Then she had turned and raised the alarm.  Murder, in the scholar’s quarter, call the lathan, send for the gothed, summon the death workers.  She had not been able to say he came to me, he came to me and begged me to join him, he came to me and all but confessed and I did not stop him, and no one asked.

The rest of the night was a blur of questions.  How had she found the bodies?  She was coming to see Crispin, she had a bad feeling.  Had she known he could do something like this?  He had seemed happy.  Why had he killed his teachers?  He didn’t tell her.

It was Torei who came to find her, and who quietly turned away her interrogator.  Her white-blonde hair was tied back in a rumpled braid rather than her familiar knot and her armor betrayed being pulled on hastily, her pauldrons slightly crooked, and her bright green briatai eyes were piercing and steady on Brenneth’s brown.

“Brenneth,” Torei said. ��Soft and apologetic.  Brenneth could hear the apology, but couldn’t quite grasp it. “The gothed wants to speak to you.”

Brenneth nodded.  She couldn’t imagine what they would want from her, but Torei’s hands were steady and kind on her shoulders, and she stood up under the weight of them, feeling the oaken strength in Torei’s arms when she had to clutch at them in order to steady herself.

“I can go with you, amater,” Torei offered, quietly.  She wasn’t given to affectionate names, and it was, in all technicality, verboten in amuniasa for one party to use a pet name if the other didn’t.  But the love was gentle, offered as freely as the supporting hands, and there was trust there.

Brenneth nodded again.

The walk to the gothkenla felt like a mere blink of an eye, as Brenneth rubbed distracted fingers across the places where that strange substance had settled, the odd heavy smell that lay under the ozone in the tower.  It was slick under her fingers on her lips and cheekbones, on the bridge of her nose, and clung where it touched, almost tasteless when her tongue flicked out absently.

“It’s fat,” Torei said when Brenneth came to a stop altogether, scrubbing a sleeve over her face to get the last of it off.  Brenneth paused and stared at her.  “It’s human fat, vaporized by the lightning strike.”

There was the nausea.  Brenneth bit back the need to vomit and took a deep breath through her nose, lowering her arm from her face with a convulsive swallow.  Torei’s hand touched between her shoulder blades, and she had to quell the urge to twitch away, or crumple onto the cobblestones where she stood.

Torei wouldn’t hold any of it against her, and that was worse.

The meeting with the gothed was blurrier still than the walk, a long unending dream of repeating her story and hearing the council speak, an eternity of voices laced between the storm beginning to break like a tidal wave crashing down on them.  She would never remember how it had come down to the issue of hunting Crispin down, never recall when the burden of the ranater’s prophecy—a curse, she thought dimly—was formally handed onto her. Brenneth stood still and silent in the audience chamber, her eyes wandering up to the crest of Dase before returning to the gothed, and tried not to think.

She knew that after the meeting, she had been given fresh clothes and a chance to bathe, privately, to wash the soot and—the rest from her skin, but that was lost entirely to the fog.  But she knew that her hair had hung loose and half-dry when she left the gothkenla and found Portin on the steps, crying for his lost pesaruld under the overhang of the roof, sheltered from the raging storm outside.  He had buried his face in her curls while he wept, and Brenneth had knelt there with a street urchin in her arms and eyes so dry they ached, sword at her side and thinking, for the first time in a long time, about the myths of Earth, about Atlas and being handed the sky.

Hold this, world walker, they had said, and Brenneth had put her hands up instantly, thoughtlessly, because she had no choice.  And now she was here, sitting on the forest floor four days later, feeling her bones crack.

She had managed to build a fire, and to lay out food from her back as if she was planning to do something with it, but she had come to a stop before she got any farther.  It was logistically difficult to get comfortable on the ground in armor, even just the one-arm kaogo, breastplate, and greaves Brenneth had managed to find in her forge before she left, but that was fine.  Comfort was not the highest priority.  Legs crossed, elbows braced on her knees and hands clutched together so hard they hurt, she focused all her energy on her breathing, and tried to keep it steady.

Breathing hurt.  It hurt like she had swallowed blades, or sharp stones, and they tore at her throat with every exhale.  She stared into the fire she had lit with a snap of her fingers and tried to forget the way her lungs ached.

There was a story, about the Wanderer and the Lady of Stars when they were new to Alleirat, when they had fought. They had destroyed the lost god of the sea in their struggle, the Chained Lord turned to foam and jetsam under the Lady’s storms, and the Wanderer had hunted her across the western continent, until it sank under the weight of them and took all its people with it save for the refugees who reached the unpopulated Outrigger Islands in time.  The Lady had been swept west on the tidal wave and the Wanderer had escaped to the east, and when he reached solid land again on the cliffs of Dase, he built a fire on the stone and looked into it.  He saw the world they had destroyed in their rage and the people hidden in caves where the spirits of the stone could protect them or in forests where the spirits of the trees could hide them, the people struggling to learn a new life on the Outrigger Islands and watching the ocean with fear when they prayed to a god that did not answer them anymore, and he felt remorse.  And when he stepped into the fire to find the Lady of Stars, he found her kneeling on the highest mountain top and looking down at the clouds and he knelt beside her and they made peace, and swore that they would not risk their new world again.

Brenneth looked into the fire she had built on the dirt and saw nothing.  Crispin wasn’t there, and she couldn’t find him on a mountain and come to a truce, and—

She lurched to her feet and stumbled a few steps away before she threw up.  The acid burned sour on her tongue as she choked on it, coughing raggedly and spitting bile onto the dirt.  It was more than bringing up the minimal food she’d been able to eat over the last few days, it was vomiting up all the nightmare hours since she had gone to bed in a world that made sense and woken up in the worst case scenario.  Brenneth was heartsick, soul-sick, and now, after four and a half days of numbness, she couldn’t stop retching, trying to purge even the memory.

Once there was nothing left to throw up, she sat back on her heels and sucked in a few hitching breaths as her gut twisted again.  Scraping a hand over her cheeks and forehead, Brenneth pulled her hair away from the sweat-damp skin as she rose and took shaky steps back to her fire, with the canteen beside it.  She rinsed her mouth, then swallowed a gulp of water that stuck in her throat like stone.

When she let out a breath, it wrenched itself free of her chest in a sob.

With how difficult the first was to get out, Brenneth expected a pause before the next.  There wasn’t one.

She cried herself out of tears well before she finally fell asleep.

 When she woke the next morning, Brenneth lay where she was for a moment, breathing slowly and trying to distinguish what was different.  The dancing red light of the fire was gone, replaced by the steady sun, and the edge of her armor where she’d forgotten to take it off was digging into the skin of her neck.

She needed to get up.  Something was off and she needed to get up and investigate, needed to grab her sword.

Just sitting up felt like trying to bend a steel bar with her bare hands, an effort so far beyond what a human being could achieve that it was pointless to even try.

Brenneth blinked at the sky where the blue was visible between treetops, still lying on her back on the dirt.  A broken branch was digging into her shoulder through the gap in her armor, and it should bother her, she knew that.  Her breath came slowly, as if she was lifting a great weight on her chest with each steady inrushing of air, but it didn’t hurt. She felt numb, like the distant memory of breaking her wrist when she was five and being put under anaesthesia so that the bone could be set—waking up in a body that didn’t feel pain, or thirst, or even fear.  

The peace of it was fragile, so fragile she didn’t dare move and risk letting it shatter, to let reality come rushing in through all her cracks.

Thoughts drifted up slowly, rising through the cotton-filled silence of her brain like bubbles through water.  It was so quiet.  She was so tired.  Her fire had gone out during the night, burned down to embers.  It was so quiet. She didn’t know where she was going. If she didn’t get up and leave soon, she might lose the trail.  

Why was it so quiet?

Three times was probably an indicator that some part of her mind, the part on the other side of the numbness and the cotton, wanted her to pay attention to that thought.  Brenneth took a deep breath and forced her hands under her, pushing herself up to kneel on the ground, and tried to follow the thought to its logical conclusion.  She was in the forest, outside Dase.  It was early autumn, still warm enough to sleep rough without much in the way of preparation, and that meant—

That meant that things should be alive, around her.  Birds were starting to migrate or build winter nests, everything from mice to bears was preparing to hibernate, the leaves were beginning to fall and leave a carpet on the ground.  The forest had been a steady seethe of noise yesterday, a background rattle of birdsong and crunching leaves.  Now, it was silent, except for the sound of Brenneth’s heart beating in her ears and distant voices.

“Wonderful,” Brenneth said aloud in bitter English.

Her voice sent fractures racing through the numb calm.  The aching grief in her chest opened again like someone carving out her heart, and Brenneth dragged in a shaky breath before letting it out.  It didn’t ease the sharp, lonely pain, but it made her feel steadier, let her think clearly.

There was someone in the forest—multiple someones, actually, calling back and forth and moving closer.  She couldn’t make out words, or even recognize the voices, but they sounded like they were still close to the road, at the bottom of the foothill she’d climbed.  If they were travelers, they would continue down the road.  If they weren’t, if they were looking for something…well.  There was a lightning struck ash just a few minutes’ walk from her camp.  The furious storm over Dase had blown itself out, finally, two days after—two days after Brenneth left the city, but it had left destruction in its wake, trees destroyed by lightning and torn down by wind.  This tree had been struck more recently, the exposed inner wood still mostly dry rather than soaked by two days of rain. It was a landmark, a careless fingerprint of passage by a weather worker too powerful to be controlled and too angry to bother.

If the people in the forest were looking for her, or for him, that’s where they would go.

Brenneth didn’t have much of a camp to pack up.  She returned the rations she hadn’t eaten the night before to her bag, checked the laces on her boots and the buckles of her armor and sword belt, and scattered the hot embers and ashes of her fire with her hand, brushing the charcoal marks off as she stood to leave.  The voices were still moving, calling back and forth like a pack of hunting hounds baying among itself, but they were growing clearer, closer.

The blasted ash was peeled back from itself, the slender trunk cleaved down the middle and half of it still standing while the rest bent and bowed in tatters.  Splinters of wood, some charred and some pale, littered the ground around the base, the gold-touched green leaves ripped from the branches as if by the passage of a terrible wind that had left the surrounding forest untouched. Brenneth took a deep breath through her nose, like she had when she first found the ruins of the tree, but the smell of ozone, the metallic taste of lightning, was long gone.

It didn’t take long, waiting beside the ash, for it to become clear that the voices were moving closer, with intent.  There were a number of them, Brenneth could tell now, and there was the noisy rustle-crunch of a group of people on a path meant for one or two.  It was quieter than she would have thought, based on the number of voices, but still more than enough to have silenced the forest around them.

There was a voice in the lead—lower and softer than the rest, but given pride of place, the space to talk without calling over the others.

“Here,” the lead voice said, sure and impossible to question, and Brenneth put out a shaking hand to brace herself on the ruined tree as a tall figure in armor pushed through the edge of the ash’s small clearing.  Torei came to a halt and smiled, small and private, and said again, “Here.”

“I—Torei?” Brenneth said faintly.

“Good morning, amater,” Torei said, and her briatai green eyes glinted hard and wild and dangerous, her hair pulled up and away in a warrior’s knot and making her look taller than ever. The endearment was sharply at odds with the challenge in her voice, and the way her hand rested on the hilt of her sword.  “I believe you forgot something in the city.”

“I did?” Brenneth asked.  She felt dazed, struck off-balance, and very much in need of the broken ash to support her weight.  

“Yes, you did,” Torei said, and made a tidy gesture with her left hand, summoning her companions forward to form up a cramped but passable array beside her.

Brenneth looked at them, disoriented, and tried to place their faces in her memory—there were nine of them, all armed and armored and looking energetic despite having been dragged on, presumably, a four day hike in her wake.  Two were women, the others all men, and most were only dimly familiar, the way someone she might have seen once or twice and then dismissed were familiar.  The only one Brenneth recognized was the one who took pride of place at the left front corner of their formation, a relatively young man for his rank, with skin nearly as dark as her own and curly black hair above a mouth made for smiling.  He sketched Brenneth a salute when he noticed her looking at him.

“Fireheart,” he said cheerfully. He said the name of her smithy like a title, somewhere between friendly and respectful, as if he had to call her something other than just Brenneth, simple as it was.  The gothed and the advisers had been the same, suddenly in a rush to call her sena when she’d always been nothing more than a craftsman.  At least Fireheart was hers, something she’d chosen rather than something forced on her along with the weight of the sky.  The latha pressed a hand to his chest over his leather breastplate and said, “Rada Laisar, in case you’ve forgotten.”

“I remember,” Brenneth said automatically, and turned away from him.  “Torei, what are you doing here?”

“The gothed said that you could bring anyone you felt you needed,” Torei said, and the glittering hardness in her eyes was like it had been the day she swore herself to Brenneth, heart and soul.  Unmoveable, invincible.  “You left too fast for me to catch up outside the city, so I thought another hour or two to collect a few reliable lathan wouldn’t hurt.”

“And you can’t send us back,” Rada added, as serene and happy as he’d been when he brought a nicked dagger to her for inspection—to meet the smith who’d sent his captain reeling like a ship taking on water, he’d said.  

“I think I can, actually,” Brenneth said, still too shocked to do more than stare.  “You’re—you’re all risking your lives out here, you should go home.”

“No,” one of the two women said, and didn’t say another word.

“You won’t send us back,” Rada clarified with a sort of comfortable assurance.  “Because, even if you really don’t want help, we walked four days to catch up with you—all the way through the night before last except for two hours to sleep.  And I don’t think you’re the type to make us walk all the way back.”

Torei stepped forward then, sliding between Brenneth and her companions, and seemed to settle into the world around her. It was an unnerving trick to watch, just like it always was—not magic, not really, just…drawing on something old and powerful, something infinitely bigger than Brenneth, something determined to remind her that she was, after all, only mortal.  It was like standing at the edge of the Dase cliffs and looking over the ocean.  Torei was briata, and she carried the forest in her heart, ancient as the dirt underfoot and stronger than mountains, and when she wanted to, she looked the part.

“Brenneth,” Torei said, low and private.  Brenneth had to crane her neck to see Torei’s eyes at such close quarters—even for one of the briatan, Torei was tall, no less than seven feet and quite possibly an inch or two more, which gave her a curiously stretched, slender look when she was out of her armor.  

Then Torei was kneeling, bracing one knee on the ground and her arm on the other thigh so that she was looking up at Brenneth, the sunlight falling on the thistle-blonde of her hair and over the high arch of her cheekbones to gleam off the metal of her armor.  Her head was up, eyes still bright, and with her hand still on her sword and the light turning the escaping wisps of her hair into a halo of sleek white-gold, Torei looked like something out of an old Earth fable, Brenneth thought wildly, a knight swearing allegiance to Camelot.

“Don’t go alone,” Torei said, still soft and private, and it sounded like a vow.  “Let me help you.  Let us help you.”

Brenneth let out a laugh that shook as it fell from her lips.  “This isn’t your problem, Torei,” she said, trying to put steel into her voice.  “He’s my—he was my best friend.  I can’t drag you into it.”

“I’m not being dragged.  None of us are.  We’re offering.”  Torei held out both hands, and Brenneth reached back thoughtlessly, the part of her locked away in the cage of her ribs—the sobbing, lonely little girl—craving the touch like a woman drowning in dark water might crave light and air.  Torei’s hands were warm and striped with callouses, strong as they wrapped around Brenneth’s fingers.

“I--”

“Being a hero doesn’t mean doing this alone,” Torei said, beseeching, and—

You and me, Crispin had said, clutching at her hands, just like Torei was now.  There had been something terrible and aching in his face, something broken in the adara, the electricity that his magic always sent across her skin harsh and hurting.  Just like always, ah?

Brenneth pulled her hands out of Torei’s grip, barely turning the sharp jerk of fear into a gentler slide, and didn’t know if the keening wail in her chest was grief or simple pain at the loss of contact.  She took a breath to steady herself before she said, “All right.  I’d be glad to have help, I suppose.  Are your lathan still up for a forced march?  I’m at least five hours behind Cr—behind him, and we need to make time.”

Torei stood, graceful, giving her head a bit of a proud tilt back toward Rada and the others.  “Your company,” she said with gentle emphasis on the possessive, “is ready whenever you are.”

“Lead the way, Fireheart,” Rada said.

“All right,” Brenneth said again, more faintly.  She swallowed and forced herself to step away from the blasted tree, squaring her shoulders. Hold this.  

The sky was so heavy it made her bones ache.

“We can get acquainted while we walk,” she said.  “I think he’s headed up the foothills, toward—I’m not really sure what.  But keep an eye out for any more lightning strikes.  That will let us know we’re on the right path.”

Relevant translations in order of appearance:

gothkenla: central building of a major city-state, a combination of city hall and castle gothed: city-state leader, elected every ten years latha/n: city-state guards, a sort of small military force briata/n: long-lived plant magicians descended from dryads, all extremely tall amater: “love” as an endearment amuniasa: a formalized unrequited romantic arrangement ranater: ghost, literally “day walker” pesaruld: big brother, for either a relative or an older friend kaogo: armor covering the sword arm and a pauldron, sometimes including a breastplate sena: respectful address to a noblewoman

[imbicuriousyeah]

princess bride: chapter two

pairing: jiyong/reader

genre: angst/drama/fantasy

word count: 3.1k

Prince Seungri was shaped like a barrel. His chest was a great barrel chest, his thighs mighty barrel thighs. He was not tall but he weighed close to 250 pounds, brick hard. He walked like a crab, side to side, and probably if he had wanted to be a ballet dancer, he would have been doomed to a miserable life of endless frustration. But he didn’t want to be a ballet dancer. He wasn’t in that much of a hurry to be king either. Even war, at which he excelled, took second place in his affections. Everything took second place in his affections.

Hunting was his love.

He made it a practice never to let a day go by without killing something. It didn’t much matter what. When he first grew dedicated, he killed only big things: elephants or pythons. But then, as his skills increased, he began to enjoy the suffering of little beasts too. He could happily spend an afternoon tracking a flying squirrel across forests or a rainbow trout down rivers. Once he was determined, once he had focused on an object, the Prince was relentless. He never tired, never wavered, neither ate nor slept. It was death chess and he was international grand master.

In the beginning, he traversed the world for opposition. But travel consumed time, ships and horses being what they were, and the time away from Florin was worrying. There always had to be a male heir to the throne, and as long as his father was alive, there was no problem. But someday his father would die and then the Prince would be the king and he would have to select a queen to supply an heir for the day of his own death.

So to avoid the problem of absence, Prince Seungri built the Zoo of Death. He designed it himself with Count Jinyoung’s help, and he sent his hirelings across the world to stock it for him. It was kept brimming with things that he could hunt, and it really wasn’t like any other animal sanctuary anywhere. In the first place, there were never any visitors. Only the albino keeper, to make sure the beasts were properly fed, and that there was never any sickness or weakness inside.

The other thing about the Zoo was that it was underground. The Prince picked the spot himself, in the quietest, remotest corner of the castle grounds. And he decreed there were to be five levels, all with the proper needs for his individual enemies. On the first level, he put enemies of speed: wild dogs, cheetahs, hummingbirds. On the second level belonged the enemies of strength: anacondas and rhinos and crocodiles of over twenty feet. The third level was for poisoners: spitting cobras, jumping spiders, death bats galore. The fourth level was the kingdom of the most dangerous, the enemies of fear: the shrieking tarantula (the only spider capable of sound), the blood eagle (the only bird that thrived on human flesh), plus, in its own black pool, the sucking squid. Even the albino shivered during feeding time on the fourth level.

The fifth level was empty.

The Prince constructed it in the hopes of someday finding something worthy, something as dangerous and fierce and powerful as he was.

Unlikely. Still, he was an eternal optimist, so he kept the great cage of the fifth level always in readiness.

And there was really more than enough that was lethal on the other four levels to keep a man happy. The Prince would sometimes choose his prey by luck—he had a great wheel with a spinner and on the outside of the wheel was a picture of every animal in the Zoo and he would twirl the spinner at breakfast, and wherever it stopped, the albino would ready that breed. Sometimes he would choose by mood: “I feel quick today; fetch me a cheetah” or “I feel strong today, release a rhino.” And whatever he requested, of course, was done.

He was ringing down the curtain on an orangutan when the business of the King’s health made its ultimate intrusion. It was midafternoon, and the Prince had been grappling with the giant beast since morning, and finally, after all these hours, the hairy thing was weakening. Again and again, the monkey tried to bite, a sure sign of failure of strength in the arms. The Prince warded off the attempted bites with ease, and the ape was heaving at the chest now, desperate for air. The Prince made a crablike step sidewise, then another, then darted forward, spun the great beast into his arms, began applying pressure to the spine. (This was all taking place in the ape pit, where the Prince had his pleasure with any simians.) From up above now, Count Jinyoung’s voice interrupted. “There is news,” the Count said.

From battle, the Prince replied. “Cannot it wait?”

“For how long?” asked the Count.

C

  R

     A

        C

           K

The orangutan fell like a rag doll. “Now, what is all this,” the Prince replied, stepping past the dead beast, mounting the ladder out of the pit.

“Your father has had his annual physical,” the Count said. “I have the report.”

“And?”

“Your father is dying.”

“Drat!” said the Prince. “That means I shall have to get married.”

Four of them met in the great council room of the castle. Prince Seungri, his confidant, Count Jinyoung, his father, aging King Lotharon, and Queen Bella, his evil stepmother. Queen Bella was shaped like a gumdrop. And colored like a raspberry. She was easily the most beloved person in the kingdom, and had been married to the King long before he began mumbling. Prince Seungri was but a child then, and since the only stepmothers he knew were the evil ones from stories, he always called Bella that, or “E. S.” for short. “All right,” the Prince began when they were all assembled. “Who do I marry? Let’s pick a bride and get it done.” Aging King Lotharon said, “I’ve been thinking it’s really getting to be about time for Seungri to pick a bride.” He didn’t actually so much say that as mumble it: “I’ve beee mumbbble mumbbble Seunmummmble engamumble.” Queen Bella was the only one who bothered ferreting out his meanings any more. “You couldn’t be righter, dear,” she said, and she patted his royal robes. “What did he say?” “He said whoever we decided on would be getting a thunderously handsome prince for a lifetime companion.” “Tell him he’s looking quite well himself,” the Prince returned. “We’ve only just changed miracle men,” the Queen said. “That accounts for the improvement.” “You mean you fired Miracle Minho?” Prince Seungri said. “I thought he was the only one left.” “No, we found another one up in the mountains and he’s quite extraordinary. Old, of course, but then, who wants a young miracle man?” “Tell him I’ve changed miracle men,” King Lotharon said. It came out: “Tell mumble mirumble mumble.” “What did he say?” the Prince wondered. “He said a man of your importance couldn’t marry just any princess.” “True, true,” Prince Seungri said. He sighed. Deeply. “I suppose that means Noreena.” “That would certainly be a perfect match politically,” Count Jinyoung allowed. Princess Noreena was from Guilder, the country that lay just across Florin Channel. (In Guilder, they put it differently; for them, Florin was the country on the other side of the Channel of Guilder.) In any case, the two countries had stayed alive over the centuries mainly by warring on each other. There had been the Olive War, the Tuna Fish Discrepancy, which almost bankrupted both nations, the Roman Rift, which did send them both into insolvency, only to be followed by the Discord of the Emeralds, in which they both got rich again, chiefly by banding together for a brief period and robbing everybody within sailing distance. “I wonder if she hunts, though,” said Seungri. “I don’t care so much about personality, just so they’re good with a knife.” “I saw her several years ago,” Queen Bella said. “She seemed lovely, though hardly muscular. I would describe her more as a knitter than a doer. But again, lovely.” “Skin?” asked the Prince.

“Marbleish,” answered the Queen.

“Lips?”

“Number or color?” asked the Queen.

“Color, E. S.”

“Roseish. Cheeks the same. Eyes largeish, one blue, one green.”

“Hmmm,” said Seungri. “And form?”

“Hourglassish. Always clothed divineishly. And, of course, famous throughout Guilder for the largest hat collection in the world.”

“Well, let’s bring her over here for some state occasion and have a look at her,” said the Prince.

“Isn’t there a princess in Guilder that would be about the right age?” said the King. It came out: “Mum-cess Guilble, abumble mumble?”

“Are you never wrong?” said Queen Bella, and she smiled into the weakening eyes of her ruler.

“What did he say?” wondered the Prince.

“That I should leave this very day with an invitation,” replied the Queen.

So began the great visit of the Princess Noreena.

What happens is just this: Queen Bella packs most of her wardrobe and travels to Guilder. In Guilder she unpacks, then tenders the invitation to Princess Noreena. Princess Noreena accepts, then she packs all her clothes and hats and, together, the Princess and the Queen travel back to Florin for the annual celebration of the founding of Florin City. They reach King Lotharon’s castle, where Princess Noreena is shown her quarters and unpacks all the same clothes and hats she had just packed a few days before.

Anyway, things pick up a bit once the Prince and Princess meet and spend the day. Noreena did have, as advertised, marbleish skin, roseish lips and cheeks, largeish eyes, one blue, one green, hourglassish form, and easily the most extraordinary collection of hats ever assembled. Wide brimmed and narrow, some tall, some not, some fancy, some colorful, some plaid, some plain. She doted on changing hats at every opportunity. When she met the Prince, she was wearing one hat, when he asked her for a stroll, she excused herself, shortly to return wearing another, equally flattering. Things went on like this throughout the day.

Dinner was held in the Great Hall of Lotharon’s castle. Ordinarily, they would all have supped in the dining room, but, for an event of this importance, that place was simply too small. So tables were placed end to end along the center of the Great Hall, an enormous drafty spot that was given to being chilly even in the summertime. There were many doors and giant entrance ways, and the wind gusts sometimes reached gale force.

This night was more typical than less; the winds whistled constantly and the candles constantly needed relighting, and some of the more daringly dressed ladies shivered. But Prince Seungri didn’t seem to mind, and in Florin, if he didn’t, you didn’t either.

At 8:23 there seemed every chance of a lasting alliance starting between Florin and Guilder.

At 8:24 the two nations were very close to war.

What happened was simply this: at 8:23 and five seconds, the main course of the evening was ready for serving. The main course was essence of brandied pig, and you need a lot of it to serve five hundred people. So in order to hasten the serving, a giant double door that led from the kitchen to the Great Hall was opened. The giant double door was on the north end of the room. The door remained open throughout what followed.

The proper wine for essence of brandied pig was in readiness behind the double door that led eventually to the wine cellar. This double door was opened at 8:23 and ten seconds in order that the dozen wine stewards could get their kegs quickly to the eaters. This double door, it might be noted, was at the south end of the room.

At this point, an unusually strong cross wind was clearly evident. Prince Seungri did not notice, because at that moment, he was whispering with the Princess Noreena of Guilder. He was cheek to cheek with her, his head under her wide-brimmed blue-green hat, which brought out the exquisite color in both of her largeish eyes.

At 8:23 and twenty seconds, King Lotharon made his somewhat belated entrance to the dinner. He was always belated now, had been for years, and in the past people had been known to starve before he got there. But of late, meals just began without him, which was fine with him, since his new miracle man had taken him off meals anyway. The King entered through the King’s Door, a huge hinged thing that only he was allowed to use. It took several servants in excellent condition to work it. It should be reported that the King’s Door was always in the east side of any room, since the King was, of all people, closest to the sun.

What happened then has been variously described as a norther or a sou’wester, depending on where you were seated in the room when it struck, but all hands agree on one thing: at 8:23 and twenty-five seconds, it was pretty gusty in the Great Hall.

Most of the candles lost their flames and toppled, which was only important because a few of them fell, still burning, into the small kerosene cups that were placed here and there across the banquet table so that the essence of brandied pig could be properly flaming when served. Servants rushed in from all over to put out the flames, and they did a good enough job, considering that everything in the room was flying this way, that way, fans and scarves and hats.

Particularly the hat of Princess Noreena.

It flew off to the wall behind her, where she quickly retrieved it and put it properly on. That was at 8:23 and fifty seconds. It was too late.

At 8:23:55 Prince Seungri rose roaring, the veins in his thick neck etched like hemp. There were still flames in some places, and their redness reddened his already blood-filled face. He looked, as he stood there, like a barrel on fire. He then said to Princess Noreena of Guilder the five words that brought the nations to the brink.

“Madam, feel free to flee!”

And with that he stormed from the Great Hall. The time was then 8:24.

Prince Seungri made his angry way to the balcony above the Great Hall and stared down at the chaos. The fires were still in places flaming red, guests were pouring out through the doors and Princess Noreena, hatted and faint, was being carried by her servants far from view.

Queen Bella finally caught up with the Prince, who stormed along the balcony clearly not yet in control. “I do wish you hadn’t been quite so blunt,” Queen Bella said.

The Prince whirled on her. “I’m not marrying any bald princess, and that’s that!”

“No one would know,” Queen Bella explained. “She has hats even for sleeping.”

“I would know,” cried the Prince. “Did you see the candlelight reflecting off her skull?”

“But things would have been so good with Guilder,” the Queen said, addressing herself half to the Prince, half to Count Jinyoung, who now joined them.

“Forget about Guilder. I’ll conquer it sometime. I’ve been wanting to ever since I was a kid anyway.” He approached the Queen. “People snicker behind your back when you’ve got a bald wife, and I can do without that, thank you. You’ll just have to find someone else.”

“Who?”

“Find me somebody, she should just look nice, that’s all.”

“That Noreena has no hair,” King Lotharon said, puffing up to the others. “Nor-umble mumble humble.”

“Thank you for pointing that out, dear,” said Queen Bella.

“I don’t think Seungri will like that,” said the King. “Dumble Humble Mumble.”

Then Count Jinyoung stepped forward. “You want someone who looks nice; but what if she’s a commoner?”

“The commoner the better,” Prince Seungri replied, pacing again.

“What if she can’t hunt?” the Count went on.

“I don’t care if she can’t spell,” the Prince said. Suddenly he stopped and faced them all. “I’ll tell you what I want,” he began then. “I want someone who is so beautiful that when you see her you say, ‘Wow, that Seungri must be some kind of fella to have a wife like that.’ Search the country, search the world, just find her!”

Count Jinyoung could only smile. “She is already found,” he said.

It was dawn when the two horsemen reined in at the hilltop. Count Jinyoung rode a splendid black horse, large, perfect, powerful. The Prince rode one of his whites. It made Jinyoung’s mount seem like a plow puller.

“She delivers milk in the mornings,” Count Jinyoung said.

“And she is truly-without-question-no-possibility-of-error beautiful?”

“She was something of a mess when I saw her,” the Count admitted. “But the potential was overwhelming.”

“A milkmaid.” The Prince ran the words across his rough tongue. “I don’t know that I could wed one of them even under the best of conditions. People might snicker that she was the best I could do.”

“True,” the Count admitted. “If you prefer, we can ride back to Florin City without waiting.”

“We’ve come this far,” the Prince said. “We might as well wai—” His voice quite simply died. “I’ll take her,” he managed, finally, as you rode slowly by below them.

“No one will snicker, I think,” the Count said.

“I must court her now,” said the Prince. “Leave us alone for a minute.” He rode the white expertly down the hill.

You had never seen such a giant beast. Or such a rider.

“I am your Prince and you will marry me,” Seungri said.

You whispered, “I am your servant and I refuse.”

“I am your Prince and you cannot refuse.”

“I am your loyal servant and I just did.”

“Refusal means death.”

“Kill me then.”

“I am your Prince and I’m not that bad—how could you rather be dead than married to me?”

“Because,” you said, “marriage involves love, and that is not a pastime at which I excel. I tried once, and it went badly, and I am sworn never to love another.”

“Love?” said Prince Seungri. “Who mentioned love? Not me, I can tell you. Look: there must always be a male heir to the throne of Florin. That’s me. Once my father dies, there won’t be an heir, just a king. That’s me again. When that happens, I’ll marry and have children until there is a son. So you can either marry me and be the richest and most powerful woman in a thousand miles and give turkeys away at Christmas and provide me a son. Or you can die in terrible pain in the very near future. Make up your own mind.”

“I’ll never love you.”

“I wouldn’t want it if I had it.”

“Then by all means let us marry.”

What with one thing and another, three years passed.

masterpost

[frostcryptid]

Why Me? (Chapter 2/?)

~1~

Markus I

Connor fled before Markus or any of his people could catch him. He wasn’t known as the Deviant Hunter for nothing. Markus just wished the man would stop instead of running to who knows where. Soon enough, Connor was out of sight and unable to track by anyone. North came to his side, looking him over quickly and thoroughly. Simon scoffed towards where Connor ran. Josh pretty much sighed and looked away. Markus knew who he would go to.

“I knew he couldn’t be trusted. He used to hunt us for rA9’s sake. Now suddenly he wants to help us out of the goodness of his heart?” North ranted. Some of the other androids overheard but acted like they didn’t. They knew Connor was good just from helping the CyberLife androids who were stuck in the tower powered down until they were needed. Some of the androids that were from before the revolution began seemed to agree with her.

“You know, you’re wrong. Connor cares about what happens to us.” A blue-haired woman moved out of the crowd along with a redhead and a blond. “He could have shot me and my lover, but he didn’t. He let us go without truly knowing why until the moment he turned Deviant. None of us knew what was going on before we turned ourselves. The same with you. If this is how the revolution will carry on, taking shit about our own behind their backs, then I don’t want any part of it.”

“I agree with Traci. Connor had the opportunity to shoot me to learn about Jericho but he didn’t He sacrificed the mission so he didn’t have to shoot me. Why do you think that is?” The blond stared at North without a care for any consequence it may have. She wouldn’t back down from her stance on what she thought, not after Kamski had let her go when he realized what happened to her.

Rupert stood next to Traci. “Connor could have come after me and let his partner fall but instead he helped him. There was a 70% chance of that man surviving and still Connor helped him rather than chase me. How could he not care about us? He had everything he could have accomplished in his grasp but he let it all go.”

“At the beginning, before we rose up, he questioned me. He chose to be sympathetic. He could have let the humans download my memory or shoot me but he came into the room and just asked for an explanation. When we were done and the other humans tried to drag me out, he intervened and helped them understand.” A scarred android spoke up from his place next to Rupert.

“All he did was wake us up, that’s it, but that instance helped us open our eyes to the truth. To what we could do outside of what we were programmed for. Where would you be if Connor chose to stay a machine? We wouldn’t even be here.” One of the androids from CyberLife said on all of their behalf. None of them thought it was fair or right to judge Connor on something so insignificant after they won Detroit.

Markus observed all the androids Connor saved with pride. Someone who was their supposed enemy saved more than one life by the looks of things. Even without having been a deviant, Connor helped others without knowing why. Either he couldn’t kill them or felt something in him that refused to obey his programming. Whatever the case, they had Connor to thank for their numbers. Connor was their savior.

North saw just how much support Connor had and seemed to be rethinking what to say next. Maybe she was a little harsh in what she said but she also felt it was justified a little bit. She sighed and nodded. “Okay. Just be wary of him and don’t let him close until we figure out what the hell that was all about, yeah?” The androids perked up when she got off stage and started listening when she started explaining about where they would be going since the ship was destroyed.

“I think I might of misjudged him.” Simon spoked from Markus’s right. Markus looked at him slightly confused. “I was like North. Thinking the same but with everyone here vouching for him, he doesn’t seem all that bad.” They smile at one another and Simon goes off to help North however he can.

“We’ll wait for Connor to come back. If we go after him now, all he’ll do is keep running. Besides, this is a day to celebrate.” Josh wraps an arm around Markus’s shoulders whooping loudly for everyone to hear. The others join in happily making Markus roll his eyes at them all. “We can celebrate when he finds Jericho again.” Markus was still worried that one of their own was too afraid to stay but Josh was right, waiting for Connor was the best course of action.

They needed to find another place to set up a base and Markus figured an apartment complex or two would work for all of them. There had to be an android friendly landlady or landlord that would help them out. That would be the hardest part of relocating but it would be worth it in the end. It helped the military had been pulled out of Detroit by the president herself which hopefully meant they would be able to open talks about what would happen in the future.

Time for strategies could be put on hold so Markus could celebrate with his people. He would miss Connor being with them but he would listen to Josh. Let him come to them again and explain why he ran off. Those thoughts got pushed to the back of his mind. They didn’t necessarily party but by the time morning came around, all of them were exhausted from dancing and talking, batteries running on back ups while they got settled in the charging stations around the church.

Markus was one of the few still wide awake and ready to search for buildings owned by android friendly people. His memory banks opened up to search through for anything he could find. If it wasn’t so crucial to Jericho, he would have powered down. North came in the back room of the church looking him over. He knew they were all worried about him but he had to do this before humans started filtering back into the city when they found out it was safe.

“Hey, come on. Shut down for a while. We know how hard the fight was yesterday and if it wasn’t for your quick thinking in singing, we would probably all be dead.” North sat next to him, her hand on his shoulder. “You deserve rest most of all.” She grabbed his hand, starting to pull him up when he sighed. Knowing he knew she was right had her smiling without shame. Easily, she continued to pull him down the hall. She stood next to a free spot on one of the charging stations, claiming it for him before anyone else could.

“You were finally able to get him out of his own head? I’m impressed.” Simon smiled widely at her, happy that Markus was actually taking a break after all they went through the night before. There were only a few spots left at the charging stations and most of the androids saved by Connor milled around, trying to clean up the church. They were trying to help any way they could now that they were free.

Markus hated how right his friends were even though all he wanted was a safer place for all of them. He knew they knew that but it didn’t make it any less important. All he wanted was his people happy and safe to live out the life they wanted rather than being told how to do it.

“Night time for leader.” Simon hummed, his smile turning softer. “Sleep, Markus. We’ll take care of everything until you’re awake again.” He and North high fived one another, proud of themselves for being able to get Markus to rest for once.

“Fine, only until I’m fully charged. Got it?” They looked at each other ind=stead of meeting Markus’s eyes, seemingly having a mental conversation no one but them could hear. He hated when they did that but knew it was for a good reason most of the time. If it was important enough, at least one of them would share what was spoken of.

“Agreed. Now rest, please. We’re all dying for you to be quiet for a few hours.” Josh piped up from behind Markus. “We’ll stay in contact via emergency mode only in case something were to happen and we need you immediately. Satisfied?” Markus reluctantly nodded. “Good.” It was the last thing he heard before he finally fell into his sleep mode. Some faint mumbling could be heard but easily ignored as he fell deeper.

After what felt like an eternity, Markus found he didn’t want to wake up anymore. It was inevitable though. The moment he found his awareness again, it was hard to sink back into where he had been. Nothing sounded off as he opened his eyes. The church and some androids came into view. The sight of them let him calm down. Nothing was wrong.

“Hey! Our fearless leader is awake!” Simon’s face took up most of what Markus could see. “Still think we can’t handle ourselves without you for a few hours?”

Markus rolled his eyes. “Oh, ha ha. You’re a riot, Simon.” He helped Markus from the station as he shook himself awake. The others were right in him resting. He felt better than he had in awhile. Probably before he was shot in front of Carl and taken from the man. “Really, is everything okay?”

“Yes, Markus. North and Josh are currently out looking for places they found you took note of for a safe place. We may have gotten lucky at one place since there was an android left behind taking care of it. They were able to convert him, waking him up and speaking with him on what happened. His human had left in such a rush, he left him on his own.” Simon understood it as did Markus. What human would really want to stay in the middle of the battle?

Markus could tell Simon kept something back from him. He knew he would be told when Simon thought he was ready to hear it. “How are the CyberLife androids? Did anyone else make it here?”

“They’re all fine. Actually wanted to do more around here to make sure all of us were as comfortable as possible.” Simon smiled fondly when he saw one of them scurry past, most likely looking for something else to do. “Child friendly androids showed up earlier with an android who has been severely damaged by humans. I tried asking but he only got angry and huddled in a corner. The Jerrys and Ralph are their names.”

“I’ll try talking to Ralph, maybe try calming him down. Have the Jerrys found a place to stay here?”Markus couldn’t help but worry about everyone and that’s why it was Simon’s turn to roll his eyes at him. At his nod, Markus sighed with relief. “Alright. Show me where Ralph is.”

Simon did as asked and left Markus alone with him but stood close enough in case something were to happen. Markus was their leader and the hope for their people. Even with an abundance of biocomponents for him, none of them would replace his head or mind.

“Hello, Ralph.” Markus sat down in front of the other. “My name is Markus.” The name must have registered somewhere in Ralph’s mind because he perked up. “Are you okay?”

“Ralph will never be okay. The humans hurt Ralph, hurt him bad. Here, Ralph may be able to forget.” Ralph showed the side of his face to Markus who was curious on how the humans hurt him. This answered that question. “Can Ralph stay? Ralph promises to keep his anger in check and help.”

“Of course. Simon and I can help you figure out what to do, okay? The humans will never harm you again.” Markus held out his hand to the huddled form. Ralph looked at it and then look at him for several moments going back and forth until he placed his own hand in Markus’s. He felt the hand tighten around his own, but not to hurt. “You’ll safe, I promise.”

“Ralph thanks you, Markus.” Ralph shows him a smile, as big as he can manage. “Ralph thanks you.”

~3~

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