The past cycle was an eye-opener to Petra, in many ways.

For one, she had realized that her relationship with Tercius was quite opposite to the relationship with Aurelia, where it was quite clear who was the mother and who was the child. Her relationship with Tercius felt more like one she had with her friends back in Spheros, somehow. That need that characterized her bond with Aurelia, was something that her bond with Tercius had stopped using a long time ago, probably when he had stopped breastfeeding as soon as he started regularly eating with his teeth.

That was the turning point, as weird as it sounded.

Mother, Father, and even her Septimus had had obligations that had taken them away and for years Tercius had been her support for at least half a day, every day of every cycle. Whenever she had been lonely or sad, Tercius was there to pat her back. He had barely been three-cycles-old when that had first happened and it continued up until he left. Rather than him needing her, Petra had realized that it was the other way around. His hand on her back was something that she could have direly used many times in the past cycle.

With Aurelia’s head resting on her right thigh and Tercius’s head on her left, Petra sat in the middle and stroked the long hair of her sleeping daughter and the short cover of hair on her son's head. At times the boy was too practical, she felt. Merely for convenience's sake and probably to avoid paying a barber, Petra mused, Tercius had taken haircuts from a mage that only knew to do one thing.

Shear off everything.

It made him look… older. And like a criminal. She didn’t like it one bit. The thin scars on his throat didn’t help at all, but she hesitated to ask about it. She knew from experience that the boy would answer, eventually. If she pressed it could be earlier, but she was hesitant to do it.

When the three guests had their bath, Petra had insisted they retire to their rooms on the claim that they must be tired, but in truth, she merely wanted to get them off her hands and then spend some time alone with her son. Things didn't turn out exactly how she wanted. Petra's snoring Father slept on her bed, stubbornly refusing to leave for his room, as the Hellraisers Leo and Portia rested in their cribs near the bed, thankfully.

Like many times before, Petra took advantage of Aurelia's love for head-scratching to make her son lay his head on her, and now that her daughter fell asleep, she knew that she could talk with Tercius one on one. She cast a single glance at the river lion that rested on Tercius's belly, and the creature looked back with piercing golden eyes. Just as she was petting her son's head, her son was patting that strange creature.

Clearing her throat gently, Petra asked, "So tell me, what happened? How come you came five cycles early?"

The tale that the mage told them, didn't align with a few details that Petra managed to get out of the girl, Penelope, in private. Tercius waited in silence, but Petra was ready for this. She had had two hours of dull conversation to prepare.

“Your clothes are as clean as if just off the line. None of you were covered in dust or sand and I couldn’t smell any sweat from any of you. When I met them, they smelt of flowers as if they just bathed. Do I need to go on?”

“There are spells for such things,” he whispered after a moment.

Petra considered it. The boy had a disdain for lying, so there probably were. How… convenient. While she had to drag water from a well, use soap and then clean herself, mages could just wave a hand and be done with it.

"— But you are right. It was a story we made up, but not out of some nefarious reason. We just can't share the details of the… craft with anyone. It's for mages only, so to speak,"

Petra felt a sourness rise in her. "And what about… Seliana, was it? She isn't a mage, by her admission,"

“She’s… she’s an exception. She has a private connection to Mistress Kalina,” Tercius answered. “Something like kin to her. I’m aware of the parallel here, but let me tell you that unlike Mistress Kalina— I’m still just a lowly neophyte,”

Petra snorted, as she felt a brief sense of jealousy. “To use Mistress as a title… now I’ve heard everything,”

"Actually, I think that I figured out what happened there. The most likely explanation for this is that Empire's Common took the sounds of a few particular words from the language of the mages— for example, Priest, Master, Mistress are just a few that I've found so far— and then they made up their own spelling and meaning. For some words it's the same, Master and Priest to name two, but for others… not so much, as you can see. The interesting thing is that the language of the mages is subtly woven into many of the languages that I found at the Pyramid and at Perdinar's— Is he still here, do you know? Remind me to visit him. I have something to talk about with him. Anyways, as I was saying—"

Only Tercius could dive into the subtleties of words with bright eyes, and even though Petra didn't care much for it, she still listened to his every word. Eventually, he spent his words on the subject and lapsed into a silence that Petra strangely mirrored.

“— I heard about the baby. That’s why I came,” he confessed.

Petra opened her mouth and promptly closed it. It seems these mages taught her son to lie. She smiled. Good. “… You heard about Portia from… just half a world away, did you? A baby barely three months old? My of my, what a small world we live in,” Petra pinched his nose and the boy waved her away.

"You were pregnant for nine months before that, weren't you? That's a cycle, in total, plenty of time to— Actually, I'm not delving into that. Think what you will. I don't mind either way," Tercius rolled his eyes at her, the cheeky brat. "But how about you tell me what happened while I was gone?"

Petra's smile turned into a reluctant frown. Here it comes. She sighed. “You just arrived. Do we have to talk about it today?”

***

“Now seems to be as good a time as ever,” Tercius said as he looked up at his mother. “Or do you want me to spend every moment thinking where everyone is?”

“I don’t know where to start…”

“At the logical start, of course. Start from the moment I left,”

His mother nodded slowly, her eyes looking into the past. Minutes went by in silence, and Tercius waited. She would start when she was ready, he knew. “… There was this sudden emptiness in my day, something that was just there where you were. It was difficult,” Petra nodded to herself. “But then the new cycle began, and word from Lux arrived that he had left you in Lissea and that you were on your way to the Pyramid. I have no idea how he managed to get the news here in mere two weeks, but he did—”

Tercius had an idea about that. Lux's shady organization had people with certain skills capable of sending word over great distances. Hells, even the Armies had this. His uncle had told him that every major town in the world had people like these, who could send messages to the people they knew. Link enough people and the Empire was covered.

"— It was around the middle of the second month that I had a doubt that I was pregnant, and the confirmation came soon after. We… err… I decided that I would keep the baby, and… Anyway… It was around this time that your grandfather's hearing started going bad. Do you remember how it was before? Double that, and you're close.

This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

“He… accidentally pushed a man into a pit as he was turning and the man came out with a broken leg. Neiran later told me… Well, I might have forced him a bit first, but he had told me that such little accidents were common. Both to him and from him. He didn’t hear people coming near him, and… he would get disoriented from time to time. Darina said that was normal and that it was old age finally catching up to him. We made him stop working, after that—”

To Ciron, his craft was… well Tercius had no real comparison. He had never had something like that. To take that away from him…

“—All was well for a few months after that, up until… your grandmother started having these pains,”

"Pains?" Tercius shifted, a bad feeling rising in his gut when Petra placed a hand on his forehead to keep him still. He saw in her eyes that she was hesitant. "Don't pretty it up on my account. Just say it as it was,"

“It's not that…” Petra shook her head. “— it was in her chest. Darina ruled out all common afflictions of the heart and something else, I can't remember what… and we even bought an expensive potion to help her recover, but…”

Tercius took a silent breath, as certain pieces came to connect. No, it’s not… Well, it is possible, but… what’s the chance?

“It went on for days. Days where she could only lie on her bed and where I had to forcefully feed her. She kept saying that she knew what it was, and that it would pass and that she only had to endure, but… three weeks in the pain medication started losing its effectiveness. She persisted for a while, even like that, but two weeks later she told us that we must either kill her—” his mother chuckled weakly. “—or take her to where she had trained to be a priestess. People there would know what to do,”

“The Temple in Spheros?”

His mother’s eyes had gone misty as she shook her head gently, careful not to wake Aurelia. “Septimus took her there, initially, but they were sent to that other place, up in the mountains above Spheros,”

"Oh," Tercius said. The monastery where Rona was supposed to go after she became a full priestess. Rona had told them about it a few times.

“Did she tell you why she wanted to go back?” Tercius asked. His grandmother had a bad opinion of the people there. But… he remembered the pain of Well formation. If she truly was developing a Well— and it was possible, he knew, but quite rare among non-magi— then the pain might have made her seek release even in the hands of ‘those two-faced back-stabbers’.

“No.” Petra shook her head, her voice losing her gentle even tone, turning more to a whisper. The leg that held the back of his head had a small tremor to it. “She… she said that she couldn’t tell us. She was in so much pain. Her face… it was red like you never saw before. Just… hot. Her forehead could have dried a wet rag in a minute…" Petra paused, clearly unable to continue.

The pain, the heat, the shakes, and the thirst… he remembered it all, and he had better luck than most. The pain had been endurable, he had had medicines that allowed him to sleep for seven or eight hours a day, people to help him with every single minute thing that had come to his mind, cooks that had fed him… Rona… With clenched teeth, Tercius stood up and went behind the divan. He placed his hands on Petra's shaking shoulders and she placed her hands on his. Tercius nodded to himself.

He had fucked this up. He would unfuck it.

“There are some letters from your father, in the first drawer near the bed,” Petra said, as she took back her hands and wiped away the silent tears. “You can read them if you want to, but I need to get a start on lunch.”

***

— when a scarlet Rona started screaming at the Head Priest, her face and neck full of those snake-like veins, I thought that the man might faint on the spot– so white did his face turn! Even as I’m writing this, I am laughing at the memory. But it all was arranged, my Dear. With the first morning light, we are heading for this place up in the mountains. Don’t worry about us, we will manage. We got this far, didn’t we? Letters might become sporadic now that we head away from any merchant routes, but I will send another letter as soon as the first opportunity comes my way. Kiss the kids for me.

Yours, Septimus

Tercius had found a small stack of letters in the drawer, and the newest date on these letters was four and a half months old. Before that, his father had sent a letter for each week of the journey, mostly via the barges that were known to travel to Nurium and further south. Four letters and after that an abrupt stop. The cut-off had been so strange that he had asked Petra where the rest of the letters were, and her answer gave him another start— even though he was prepared for it. There were none.

The first letter said that Rona had started using a more potent kind of pain suppressor after they found it in an apothecary in Zuros, which on one hand gave Tercius some relief, but he also grew worried when he saw the name that Septimus gave. Dead Man's Dream.

“Certainly an ominous name… Luckily, she’s a woman,” he murmured as he reread the first letter. “But with a name like that, I would think that it was a poison or something,”

He suddenly realized that it probably was that and more. A poison and a cure. Tercius shook his head, as he sorted the letters in chronological order. He returned the letters to where he had found them and sat on the bed, near his sleeping grandfather. Tercius lowered his eyes to his palms and released a sigh. Now there were only two more unanswered questions that plagued him and for which he could get answers from the people in his vicinity.

Where was Neiran?

Why did his grandfather bar the front door with shaped stone?

***

“Neiran started working at one of the quarries south of town right after your grandfather stopped working. They have these dreadful little houses there, just filled with workers to the brim, but he insists that it's better than losing almost three hours every day on travel,” Petra answered as she prepared lunch. Tercius observed the smooth movements of her hands, as she used the knife as an extension of her hand, while the other hand moved with a mind of its own. Considering the skill she had gained before he left for the Academy, he supposed that it was only natural. “Neiran’s a good boy, you know. He comes to visit your grandfather every week. And with everything that’s been going on recently, I’ve tried to convince him to stay here—”

The rapid knife suddenly stopped working and Petra stopped talking.

The sudden silence made Tercius perk up. “What has been going on? Don’t think that I missed the barred-with-stone door… I just hope that’s not a new style…”

Finally, she laughed. A weak one, but a laugh nonetheless. Is that… nervousness? Tercius frowned as his mother finished the laugh awkwardly.

“It’s a long story… but I guess that it can be condensed into a few simple sentences,” Petra said, as she returned to chopping vegetables. “A week before I had the baby, these men, six of them, came and said that they are your father’s family and that they are to take him and us to the Capital,”

“Oh,” Tercius blinked rapidly. “So… Seeing as you are still here, I guess that something went wrong?”

Petra nodded absentmindedly as she made another pause with knifework. “When I refused to come with them and tell them where Septimus is, first they tried directly to take me and the children. They tried to use force and… that had been a mistake, let me tell you,” she laughed suddenly. “You should have seen their faces when they sank into the floor up to their necks and stone came alive around them. I’ve never seen your grandfather look so angry,”

Tercius leaned on his seat, his face morphed into a grim frown. Using force on a pregnant woman? Was that why the baby was so small? Did his mother have it prematurely? His breath quickened.

“And then?” he spat the words.

“I should have let Father feed them to the foundation, as he wanted to do,” Petra suddenly said harshly. “But… but I thought that with them being your father’s family… or working for them or whatever, that we should let them go. I didn’t want to create any bad blood between us, you know? Your grandfather he… he handed them over to the Peacekeepers. Everything returned to normal— at least it looked like that for a while. Then a month ago two men tried to take Aurelia, right off that gate—”

His lower jaw pushed upwards and his mother stopped talking to give him a look. With a force of will, he relaxed. "—Luckily, my baby girl is smart and fast. She screamed for help and ran away from them— and you know what happens to people who try going after children in this neighborhood…"

Tercius nodded. He did know. Most of the people in their immediate neighborhood had children of Aurelia's age, and a few parents of those children were either old or current members of the Army. There was always someone to watch over the children, he knew. Always. And reinforcements were only a loud shout away.

“Did they escape?” Tercius asked even as he hoped that they didn’t.

“They did,” Petra nodded darkly. “… after that Aurelia refused to leave the house for a week, and then when she wanted to go out, I had to forbid it. I went to talk to the Peacekeepers after it happened, but these people have some connection to the Army here. Even after what they did, they still come and just stand there, near the gate, as if nothing had happened! Sometimes they try to enter the garden… one time they tried to enter at night…”

Tercius took a deep breath, his face taking on a blank expression. “Is that why grandfather is sleeping like a rock during the middle of the day?”

Petra nodded with a deep breath of her own. “Ever since then, your grandfather has watched over the children while I sleep, and that’s mostly at night.”

"… Do you think that… Are they observing the house right now?" Tercius asked as he glanced at the stone-barred window. Calling it a window was a bit generous, he supposed, as it was only a set of fist-sized holes arranged in an elliptical shape.

His mother answered that she didn't know for sure, but she guessed that they did. She told him of how they survived the past few months, how neighbors angry at the Peacekeepers and their inaction bought her food and delivered it to her gate, how she tended Rona's garden, how she thought about selling her shop that was currently closed… The more he heard, the more he wished that his clenched hands had something to squeeze and destroy.

If he had known that things would turn out this way… Tercius would have demanded of Lux to keep quiet about them. But… for some strange reason he couldn't fathom, he didn't believe that Lux was the one who arranged things to be this way. He might have mentioned them, but he was not behind this. Lux was many things, but needlessly cruel was not one of them.

What these men were doing was torment. First, they attempted to physically do their work and when that didn't work, they resorted to something worse.

Pure mental abuse daily.

Lux might do something like that to an enemy— No, Tercius knew that Lux would do so if it meant a win for him— but to do it to his brother, sister-in-law, and their children? Tercius didn't think so. At least he hoped so.

The more likely case was that this was the work of someone else. Someone either a part of his extended family or maybe even someone unrelated, who was working under a pretense.

Too many angles, too many unknowns.

Tercius didn't like it one bit. None of it.

He knew one thing for sure— he had to think about this tangled spider’s web and figure out a passable way to set things right.