The crying of the cicadas always stirred up the glassy shards of her shattered heart, the broken, jagged pieces of herself that cut as they passed through her and carved away at the bounds of the empty cavity in her chest. The familiar melody widened it ever-larger, and once she feared that the cavern would grow so great that beneath her skin would be only emptiness, her very self rendered hollow.

Mami no longer feared this. It was difficult, she found, to stir up the terror that she once knew so well, now that the thing that birthed it had already come to pass.

On nights like this, when the cicadas crying cut through the wooded wilds in the darkness the sun left behind, the other members of her company, her friends, knew to give her space. She loved them for it, but she hated that it was needed. She hated that her own weakness, the blackened and calcified sickness in her heart, caused her to push them away when she would have given anything to have them close, to soothe the ache. Would have given anything to have the strength to bear it.

Strength she could not summon. Strength she did not have.

Work, she found, stemmed the tide. It did not work entirely—not even close—but it was enough to allow her to keep up appearances. Not for the first time, she envied her little sister, and not for the first time, the emotional reprisal was immediate. After all, Homura did not elect to be born with strength that Mami—Haruhi—could only marvel at. Her sister did not choose to be perfect, nor could she, whether as Mami or as Haruhi, honestly say to herself that her younger sister was even remotely aware of her flawlessness. She simply was, just as Haruhi, Mami, simply was not.

The Black Forest was a wooded area that expanded broadly for half the distance between Bantamoor and Maelnaulde; this was the end of their third day within its bounds, and so they were nearing the centre of the antediluvian wood, camped for the night as they were in a clearing a fair enough distance from the road to throw off highwaymen but not so far that it would take them an inordinately long time to return to the road come morning. A roaring fire blazed in the makeshift hearth, made with magic so that it would burn fuel more slowly and be less likely to spread and create an incident, and its light was sufficient for her purposes as she read through one of the several grimoires she had brought along with her for the trip, for moments just like these.

Spellcraft fascinated her, and magic came when she called as an eager hound, patiently awaiting her command; as this was her sole use to her friends in a combat situation, she bent her free time away from them towards its study. The spells that made up the broader discipline of white magic came a touch more easily—enhancing and enfeebling magic had spells that fell into one or the other broader classification, but light and healing magic were white exclusively—but that was not due to her lack of command of the other, but rather that black magic, both elemental and dark, were…surlier in attitude, and required a bit more coaxing natively. It also fascinated her how strongly the four exclusive classifications identified with certain emotions, and it frustrated her somewhat that few seemed to appreciate such subtleties.

Why couldn’t others appreciate the beauty in the duality of dark and light magic? That dark was at once soothing and chaotic, light at once vindictive and ordered? Why bring unnecessary mysticism into the equation and debase the nuances and variances into arbitrarily clear moral boundaries? Light was good and dark was evil—why place such things that were so beautiful in their natural states into such limiting and small-minded boxes? Certainly, dark magic was terrifying, but it was the terror of freefall; light magic brought security through tyranny and domination, so what sense did it make for those who cried out for liberty to endorse light magic in practically the same breath? To Mami, it was infantile superstition, and nothing more. It didn’t stop people from talking about her as she passed, and she had no doubt she was perpetuating more than a few racial prejudices with her unbiased approach to magic, but she could not bring herself to care; in this, at least, she found a nugget of Homura’s strength within her, the strength to defy the world and tear it apart if it tried to stop her.

It was one such heretical, thus rare and difficult to obtain, text of dark magic that she pored over by the unnaturally brilliant firelight at that moment. In her hands was the Ars Goetia, a grimoire disguised as an index of demons, but which contained an incredibly powerful dark magic spell within its aged vellum pages, aptly known as ‘Goetia’—Mami had long since accepted that on the whole, dark mages were incorrigibly cheeky and titled their encoded grimoires with names that were incredibly on the nose—that was besides the first of the five volumes of the Legemeton, all of which she had painstakingly obtained. Beside her, then, was an open volume bound in leather that she used for the transcription of notes, a quill moving autonomously as her mind worked at unearthing the book’s secrets.

Of course, it was just her luck that just as things were beginning to come together and the encryption was unravelling itself at long last, she heard the approach of footfalls that, while familiar, belonged to none of her comrades. It took her only a moment to look up and confirm that the person approaching possessed a familiar pair of mocking mauve eyes, and in that moment, she decided that concealing her irritation at the interruption would be a futile effort; Casimir would draw it out of her one way or another. It was wiser to just let it show, and spare herself the unpleasantness of Casimir’s acerbic tongue carving it free of her living flesh. “What could you possibly want?”

“You wound me,” Casimir replied without hesitation, slipping into faux-offence with ease that she had at first found disturbing, and now only tiresome. “Can a man not simply wish to grow closer to his comrades in moments of respite?”

“A man can. But I think we both know you are exempted from that particular title,” Mami hissed.

“Touché, I suppose…” Casimir sighed. Then his false mirth melted away, leaving a countenance that combined beauty with bitterness to beget cruelty, as he plopped down beside her, and for once Mami was grateful it was Casimir, someone who, unlike Dorothea, was at least considerate enough to not attempt to pry into the matter that had her attention. He had even avoided disturbing the drying ink of her makeshift notebook, rather pointedly at that. “If you must know, I’m curious.”

“I think we both know you’re well past the experimentation stage, Casimir,” Mami jibed. “I don’t know who you think you’re fooling.”

“Cute,” Casimir bit out. “But more specifically, if I’m going to go digging for information on this little extracurricular outing you consented to my undertaking, I’m going to need context to determine what points are salient, so that I know when I can leave.”

“Why not just stay and learn as much as you can?”

“It’s at times like these that I am reminded that there are distressingly few people aware of the finer points of infiltration,” the former guttersnipe lamented. “I am given to wonder, actually, on a separate point, whether you are similarly chagrined when others demonstrate an equally thorough ignorance of your art.”

“Point taken,” Mami sighed.

“And now we see why I don’t stick my neck out,” he complained. “Carve your way out of the dreg heap you’re born into, and suddenly everyone just assumes everything out of your mouth is a barb. Why should I bother with being genuine if everyone just assumes venom out of me regardless of what I say or do? I ask you.”

Mami recoiled slightly. “I’m… I apologise…”

“Oh, spare me. The day someone demonstrates genuine contrition for assuming the worst of me is the day the sun rises in the west and sets in the fucking east,” Casimir spat.

“You don’t exactly do much to dispel that assumption, you know,” Mami shot back.

“No, I don’t. Because I have long since given up on trying,” he replied. “You don’t survive in the gutter by stubbornly championing a lost cause. If everyone is going to assume that I’m a viper simply by virtue of the circumstances of my birth, which is most assuredly the case, then I figure that I might as well become one in truth and make the venom work for my benefit. You can only beat a mongrel so many times before biting back becomes all they know.”

“I do, for the record,” Mami ventured. “It baffles me that they can’t see what I do, that they cannot bring themselves to look upon a musty old tome full of thousands of years of accumulated knowledge of the Mystic Arts with the same wonder that wells up inside of me. The fact that they don’t even want to learn, that they’re not even curious, is… ‘Vexing’ is far too small a word for it. I will apologise, regardless of what you say, for being so thoughtless that I treated your art the way others treat mine. Hypocrisy leaves a foul taste at the back of my throat.”

Casimir chuckled mirthlessly. “I guess you leave me no choice but to accept the apology, for however little that’s worth out of my mouth.”

“Will you explain it to me? Or at least, the part of it you were talking about?” Mami asked tentatively.

“What, are you going to tutor me in magic in exchange, princess?”

“If you’re willing, I would not be opposed to it,” Mami replied. “We’d have to start with the very basics, mind, but I can teach you to command a few rudimentary spells here and there.”

“Hah. You really mean that, don’t you, princess?” Casimir remarked, bemused. “You’re way too kind, you know that? You don’t see a lot of that in the gutter. Kindness… It’s a fatal flaw there, in those destitute, hopeless places that exist everywhere you go. Being kind like you are, it too often leads to weakness, and that weakness brings forth nothing but more grief.”

“That sounds like something Homura would say,” Mami chuffed. “Right after telling me that you can only get let down so often before you have to start examining whether your expectations are unreasonable or not.”

“This Homura sounds like a very wise woman. Was she your sister?”

“She is, on both counts,” Mami admitted. “Not conventionally—she was completely hopeless at dealing with people on any kind of meaningful level—but she was strong. Determined. Sometimes she felt like an inevitability more than a person. As long as Homura was Homura, you knew that all was right with the world. There was no one else quite like her. Sometimes… Sometimes I wish I was a lot more like her.”

“This is me talking entirely out of my ass right now, but my guess is that she’d say something similar about you,” Casimir said. “I never had any siblings myself. Not like you apparently had. All my highborn sire’s other children, trueborn and bastard alike, would as soon render garters of my guts as look at me, after all. But I knew a few other urchins like me who had siblings they would gladly lay down their lives for, siblings who would just as quickly return the favour. They were always saying sappy shit about each other. Of course, my half-siblings, especially the fully highborn, were just as likely to slit each other’s throats as they were mine. If I had to take a wild guess, I’d say that siblings that have to rely on each other to make it out in one piece have the kinda bond you seem to share with your sister.”

“We didn’t grow up in the gutter like you did,” Mami dismissed. “It’s not the same.”

“I didn’t say ‘siblings in the gutter.’ Fuck knows plenty of my sire’s bastards were equally as destitute as I was, after all,” Casimir rebuked. “And relying on each other to survive doesn’t just mean working together to steal a crust of bread. That kind of relationship takes as many forms as the trouble that prompts them to form that bond does.”

“And here I was expecting you to start dressing me down for growing up posh or something like that, talking about how much worse you had it,” Mami sighed. “You’re just full of surprises, aren’t you?”

“People see what they want to see,” Casimir shrugged. “They couldn’t care less, by and large, to look deep enough to find the answer. An answer serves just as well in their minds.”

A homely woman’s face twisted into a gruesome rictus of fury flashed before Mami’s mind’s eye. Inadvertently, she started curling in on herself. “Yeah…”

“Will you tell me about her?”

The shock broke her out of her reverie. “What?”

“Your sister. Homura,” Casimir supplied. “You don’t have to tell me if you really don’t wanna, but I’d like to listen.”

“Was this what you were curious about?”

“In part,” the man shrugged. “An infiltration is like a noose that you slip over your head to coil around your neck. It constricts faster or slower depending on the mission, but it strangles you eventually regardless. I needed to know enough about her to know when I could leave, and slip the noose in so doing. But it’s also because I feel like you’ll feel better if you talk about her to someone who won’t immediately smother you in pity and well-wishes. Dorothea’s my friend and all, but she’ll take that and run with it and invent some wild scheme that she’s just smart enough to pull off and make it look like it took no effort. Ardrea’s joined to her girl at the hip. Cassandra’s the type to smother you in well-wishes wearing the skin of understanding as a gruesome costume, and Zarya’s just too close to you to be able to give you that kinda space you’ll need to feel how you gotta feel.”

“What about Ophelia?”

“Ophelia just scares the ever-loving fuck out of me.”

Mami laughed. “At least you’re honest.”

“For the moment,” Casimir shrugged. “Oh, and, don’t breathe a word of this to anyone. I’ve got a reputation to uphold, after all.”

“Your secret’s safe with me,” Mami replied as she calmed. “Let’s see… How does one begin to describe Homura…”

“Generally, one begins at the start,” Casimir jested. “In all seriousness, take your time. There’s no rush.”

“Where my sister and I grew up, in the Far East, there was a concept known as the Yamato nadeshiko, the ‘flower of feminine beauty’ according to our culture’s values. There were a large number of qualities a Yamato nadeshiko was said to have, but…for most of our lives, Homura was the perfect image of that ideal, and it was natural. Effortlessly, she had this sort of quiet strength and silent pull, this…this elegance that made words pale and turn to ash. She wasn’t great when it came to managing people or communicating her feelings, but people were just drawn to her.

“When we were young, she was…small. Frail. Sickly. It was believed that she wouldn’t be able to live a normal life with how ill she seemed to always be, how weak her pulse was. For years, they weren’t able to find her heartbeat because it was so quiet and slight. Our parents had just about given up on her, this small child too helpless to fend for herself, her lungs too weak to allow her to master speech. But…on the sixth anniversary of her birth, she bloomed. My little sister, who listened to me speak to her in silence, with whom I sat and played no matter how heartbreaking it was, in those days when it seemed like I was the only one who remembered she even existed…she walked. She learned to speak, haltingly and with great hesitation at first, and when she went out into the sunlight on her own power for the first time, before either of us knew it she had a group of friends who hung onto her every slight change of intonation.”

Mami sighed. “When she bloomed, she grew. She was never very tall, and remained waifish with the passage of years, but her speech became decisive, and she grew strong in body and mind. Intellectually I know now that she kept all of her anguish and struggles confined within herself, unable as she probably was to give voice to things that she found difficult, but from the outside looking in, she was a figure of silent determination. She never gave up, and when something gave her trouble, she worked at it until it bent to her will. Her mind… It was as terrifying as it was beautiful, Homura’s mind. But though she remained short and willowy and slight throughout our adolescence, she did not let that stop her.

“I…admired her, in many ways. In some ways, I still do. Imagine, if you will, this girl, one hundred sixty centimetres in height and not a sliver more, a slip that looked like she could be blown away by a stiff wind; and then imagine watching as she found ways to make up for her lack of physical strength with frightening speed and indomitable dexterity. That’s how she approached athletics. Jūjutsu, which is hand-to-hand, kenjutsu, which is the sword, even sōjutsu, which is the spear and relatively obscure in our home, she learned with unerring discipline and relentless precision; not only did she participate in competitions, she usually won them. If she was not overachieving, she considered her efforts insufficient and thus worked harder. She was frightfully intelligent, and in the traditional arts she also excelled.

“We grew…distant.” Mami took a deep, shuddering breath.

“It’s okay. This must be more difficult for you than I was expecting. We can stop if you need to take a break…”

“No. No, I will continue,” Mami insisted. “When we were young, I was the older sister, and it was my job to protect her from harm. But she grew, and grew, and I found myself imprisoned in her shadow, unable to escape. Her star rose, and I remained bound to the earth. But I did not resent her. How could I? I loved her. She was my little sister, and she was so kind and understanding. She always made time for us to sit together and play games, or cook, or just dance. She always went out of her way to make sure I knew she counted me as her sister, was always there when I cried, ready to dry my tears, without judgement, always accepting and nurturing to the point where I started joking about her taking my place as the older sister. Our parents had their own lives, separate and apart from us, and though we lived in the same house, we dwelt in two separate worlds, our parents and we. In many ways…she filled the void our mother left with her distance and reservation. She was so good and so pure, so selfless… I knew that all I could do to protect her was to intercept the threats to which her kindness and purity blinded her. And so…that was what I did.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“What do you think I meant?” Mami chuckled mirthlessly. “Homura was beautiful, ethereal. Like the moon, her presence was as serene as it was remote. She drew out of us all of our ugliness, our weakness, our doubts and our sorrows, and she soothed them without ever asking for anything in return, beyond perhaps our companionship. But it was never… It was never reciprocated. I never knew what went on in Homura’s mind. I never knew what she liked, what she hated, what she dreamt of, what she feared… She was my sister, and I didn’t know a damn thing about her. And…neither did any of her friends. But when one as strong and gentle as my sister, so fragile and yet so steadfast, exists in the world, there are always those who seek to defile that, to debase and destroy and violate. And so I made up my mind. If she was to be so unrelentingly her, to care for me so, and soothe my wounded heart over the slightest of woes, I would be the one who sacrificed myself in her stead. If they wished to defile, I would be defiled in her stead. If they wished to debase, I would bear that debasement with a grin for knowing that I was sparing her that. If they wished to destroy, to violate, I would be violated and destroyed instead. In her shadow I lurked, and from that shadow I would defend her.”

“Princess… I…” Casimir’s expression was not one of horror, but it was certainly pained.

“I protected my beloved little sister in the only way I could, the only way that remained to me in the darkness of her shadow. I no longer told her of my woes—how could I? Homura would have never allowed me to suffer in her place had she known, and so she could not be allowed to know, could never find out. She could not be allowed to take from me the only way that remained for me to protect her, to be the older sister she needed. Even now, the idea of her suffering while I could work to prevent it… It is unbearable. Unthinkable.” Mami dragged a hand through her raven hair, a hand that trembled and shook, unmoored and unsteady, buffeted by the torrents that raged within her. “Every sin I bore, every degradation and indignity… It was my love for her, those things, the only way I could ever give back. The only way I could fulfill my duty as an older sister to one who no longer seemed to need me, who grew more and more distant as her flame burned ever brighter.

“I suppose it was fitting, then, that it came to nothing in the end.”

“I don’t like where this is going.”

Mami looked to the night sky, blinking away the fat and pendulous unshed tears that pushed at the gates of her eyes. “You see, as the years passed, Homura only grew more beautiful, to the point where our father came to desire her. His desire grew and grew, until one night, he moved to violate my sister. His own daughter. I was not strong like Homura, so all I could do… The only thing I could do was ensure that if he had to violate a daughter, it would not be her. And so I bore the cruelty of others that she might be spared it. That, of course, all came crumbling down when our mother found our father on top of me, rutting away and grunting like a beast as I bit down on my lip so hard it bled so that Homura wouldn’t have to see it, wouldn’t have to hear it, would not be awoken by it and could remain ignorant to the evils of the world around us.

“Predictably, she freaked out. But did she blame the man who pinned me down and took me so that he would not take my sister? No. Clearly I had seduced him. I had a record of this, after all—she only had to ask around a little and all those deeds I had done to spare Homura came forth like a tsunami. Destitute, I was cast out of my home with only the shirt on my back, a pariah in my town as word got around. ‘Oh, the whore,’ they would say, ‘so depraved and evil that she tricked her own father into sleeping with her.’” Her breath was unsteady, coming faster as she remembered the jeering, the leers, the scorn from people she had known all her life, turned on her in an instant, but she had come too far now. She could not turn back, she could not be so weak. Homura would never be so weak. Never so weak as her. “Predictably, I could no longer shelter Homura. I was not allowed near her. So I drifted. My life’s purpose had been stripped from me—what, then, remained?

“Thankfully, one of the men who desired my sister took pity on me and took me in. He and his girlfriend were…kinder than I had expected, or at least, kinder than the rest. I lived with them for a while, and helped them earn money by letting them sell me. I had nothing to lose, after all. But… Homura found me. I’m not sure how, but she did. She started leaving my favourite foods at my doorstep, and wherever I went, wherever the couple and I moved, she always found us within a few days, leaving food and music and all the things we used to love to share together.” Mami shook her head, hoping to dispel the despair that was coiling around her tongue, constricting it and her voice to the point where it was beginning to frustrate her efforts. “And then I fell pregnant.”

“Princess…”

“Please, Casimir,” Mami pleaded breathlessly.

Casimir sighed, gesturing airily in exasperation. “Fine. Continue.”

“…When we confirmed that I was quick, it was like a switch flipped. Kindness…became nothing but a burning memory…” Mami continued haltingly.

“Jealousy?”

“Nothing of the sort. If I had to characterise what Tokio felt, I guess it’d be joy. She seemed genuinely pleased that I was with child, and the…the cruelty… She did it with words of love. They both did, Tokio and Arata, though Tokio was clearly in the lead. They put needles in me, made my head fuzzy… Made me forget…

“Until one morning I could not remember her face. I could have walked past her on the street and have never recognised my own sister. I was…everywhere at the end of time, caught in a blur that even now haunts my nightmares and creeps into the waking world every now and again. I…I don’t know…” Mami opened her mouth to speak further, but only a harsh, harrowing croak came from her throat, and she could not speak another word.

The cover of the grimoire was pried out of her fingers, and though she could not speak, she continued to attempt to voice a protest. Casimir’s voice, chiding gently, though under some strain, came forth. “It will be here in the morning. Right now, you’re in no state to study. Don’t worry. I won’t leave you alone. Just close your eyes and try to sleep, alright?”

Mami struggled a little, but then nodded feebly when Casimir’s arms began to encircle her, awkward and hesitant, but determined and sure, pulling her against his chest and cradling her head a touch awkwardly, one of her horns pressed flush against the steady beating of his heart. Then came his voice anew, melodic and soothing, and it took her a moment to realise that Casimir was singing to her.

Dún do shúil, a rún mo chroí,

A chuid den tsaol, ‘s a ghrá liom;

Dún do shúil, a rún mo chroí,

Agus gheobhair feirín amárach…

She did not know the language, but something in her quieted at its sound, and slightly, ever so slightly, piece by piece, parts of her slipped into dreamless sleep.

Tá do dheaid ag teacht gan mhoill ón chnoc

Agus cearca fraoich ar láimh leis;

Agus codlaidh go ciúin ‘do luí sa choid

Agus gheobhair feirín amárach…

The last complete thought that passed through her mind that night was, I don’t think I’ll mock him for this one in the morning…

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

“You just can’t help yourself, can you?”

Zarya. The only possible snarl in this little act of uncharacteristic goodwill. Well, at least as far as everyone else was concerned.

Casimir lifted his gaze away from the flickering of the flames, and let out a small sigh of relief when he saw the expression on the Galeborn’s face. The Galeborn of the Maelstrom in centuries past had been known as ruthless pirates, the most feared and bloodthirsty reavers on the seas, and that kind of ancestral fury was far from the kind of trouble Casimir was willing to draw to himself. “I fail to grasp the insinuation.”

“Like fuck you do,” Zarya chuckled softly. “Knew you had a heart, Mirri.”

Casimir could not resist rolling his eyes, wincing at the flash of irritation the childish nickname sent shooting through him. “Please, don’t. I get enough of the endless diminutives from Dorothea.”

“Can’t help but notice you didn’t deny what I said.”

“Why would I? It’s true,” Casimir replied, shrugging as much as he dared with the drahn’s head resting against his pectorals, her horn pressing up to his ribs provoking mildly moderate discomfort. “Like I told your lover, I always had one. But everyone seemed to decide that since I was a guttersnipe born and raised, I simply had to be a cold-blooded little snake. And I eventually got tired of correcting them.”

Zarya chuckled again, still soft, but mirthless. “You know, I think I know how you feel.”

“Really.”

“Yup,” she said, popping the p. “Tell you the truth, you remind me a lot of myself from when I first left the Maelstrom a while back.”

“Define ‘a while.’”

“Do you know how old I am?”

“Haven’t the faintest,” Casimir replied truthfully. “If I had to guess by hume metrics, you’d be in your mid to late twenties.”

“Hah. Around there, I guess, in relative terms,” she remarked, plopping herself down next to where Casimir and Mami were nestled together with a quiet thud. “Let’s see…I reached about four hundred twenty-three before I stopped counting. Didn’t seem to make much sense to continue past that point.”

“…What…?”

“Okay, I lied, I have kept track. Six hundred thirty-three this year,” Zarya sighed.

“You’re joking.”

“Not particularly,” she shrugged. “Galeborn as a species don’t age past around twenty-four-ish, and we don’t die unless we’re killed. Comes with the territory of being a magic fish person under the protection of an ancient grelk.”

“…I have so many questions…”

“I’m sure ya do. None of ‘em are particularly relevant right now, but hold ‘em and I’ll go ahead and answer you at a later date,” Zarya rebuffed. “But yeah. I left when I was one hundred thirteen years old, and I was a little shit with a mountain-sized chip on my shoulder. Worse than you, actually, and by quite a fair distance—I was unironically what you pretend to be, caring for no one and nothing beyond myself and my own gratification. I sought thrills at the expense of everyone around me, got off on twisting and warping people until they wrung themselves dry, and though I laughed and laughed and laughed, I never…felt. Not truly.”

“What changed?”

“What changed, indeed…” she mused, looking up at the stars. “I guess things started changing when I found someone, really. Or, perhaps more accurately, she found me.”

“Old flame?” Casimir prompted, curious.

“Hardly,” Zarya snorted. “Mami here’s the only one for me. The person I’m talking about, I never bedded her, not even once. She wasn’t up for it, and it really wasn’t that kind of relationship besides. The person I found…there’s no one quite like her. Never was, never likely to be. One of a kind. I went to her looking for her blood, was gonna nick it and shuffle off into the sunset, maybe mooch for a while. Of course, the reality was…far more complicated than that.”

“So a heist went wrong?”

“In a sense. She knew what I wanted right away, actually. She was willing to give it to me, even, but she wasn’t about to condone being irresponsible with it. So she taught me how to use it, and several other things. I stuck with her for a while, a few centuries or so—I started making a game out of how abrasive I could be before she finally snapped, but she never did. Whenever I got up to shit, she would just give me that same indulgent smile. It pissed me the fuck off for the longest time, ‘cuz I thought she thought she was better than me. But eventually, it occurred to me that it wasn’t that she thought she was better than me, but rather that she thought I was better than I thought I was.”

“I’m sure you’ve had that experience before,” Casimir protested. Surely it couldn’t be that simple.

“I had, yeah, but usually when I burned them enough times, they got wise. This girl, she wasn’t naive. Not like that. She had this way about her, this pull, that made you want to see things her way. It was subtle, because she didn’t know she had it, but eventually, like everyone else, I started wanting to live up to her expectations. She saw more than the cold-hearted con artist, and I started wanting to look in the mirror in the morning and see that same more in myself that she saw. She gave me a chance, a shot to be better than I was, and gave me the benefit of the doubt that it was within my reach to be that, even when I didn’t. And so, eventually, it clicked.”

“What happened?”

“I proved to myself I was more than I had been, and then went back to the Maelstrom to start laying down the law. I took the seat of Queen of the Gales, eradicated the institution of the Free Captains that once governed my homeland, and reformed the state religion in a big way,” Zarya stated. “Right now, I have a friend of mine warming the seat for me, but eventually I’m gonna ask Mami to come with me back to the Maelstrom. Not now, of course—she needs time before she’ll be ready for something like that—but I had a duty to my people, and I still do.” She shook her head. “But it all started with that, Casimir. With someone who was willing to look at an avowed and unrepentant scoundrel and see something worth believing in. Who was willing to give me a chance to figure out for myself what my best self looked like, and to support me every step of the way as I reached for that, until I eventually held it in my hands.

“People say the scorn of others should be enough to tell you when you’ve done wrong, but in my experience, it’s kind of the opposite. It’s much easier to be comfortable with all of the horrible things you’ve done when you’re feared, distrusted, and hated for it. It wasn’t until I met her, and she treated me with kindness and forgiveness, truly and freely, that I started to wonder if I had anything to repent for. So, again, I get where you’re coming from. People are terrified of you and they despise you, you and what you represent, so it’s easy to be cutting and underhanded and petty. It’s easy to be vicious when people are being vicious to you. And to tell you the truth, you’re handling being in this phase of your life a fuck of a lot better than I did when it happened to me. I don’t have my friend’s eye for talent or goodness, I’ll admit that. But I’m certain she’d see great things in you. All you really need, Casimir, is someone willing to have your back as you reach for those stars.”

“…I’ll keep that in mind, I suppose,” Casimir replied warily.

“All I can really ask for,” Zarya chuckled. Then she stood, the dirt sliding off of the garments of layered bright blue and earthen brown seasilk with which she clothed herself, before clapping him on the shoulder. “Good talk.”

“Aren’t you gonna get on my case about sleeping with your girl?”

“Nah. Maelstrom culture is pretty heavily weighted towards polyamory, and even if that wasn’t the case, neither of you swing that way, so it’s double cool, yaah?”

“You’re no fun…” Casimir faux-sulked.

“I’m oodles of fun, Mirri. You can’t handle the amount of fun that I live and breathe,” Zarya jibed right back. “And besides, I don’t wanna have her moved, certainly not on my account. She needs the rest.”

“I’m…not sure how to respond to that,” he said truthfully.

“Good. Then you can shut up and keep being my girl’s pillow for the night. Not that you would be nearly as good at that as me, given…” She gestured to the moderate-to-considerable swell of her chest underneath her bright blue seasilk blouse and brown vest layered to look like leather. “But it’s my turn to take watch anyway, so I can’t really do that myself.”

“As you will…” Casimir sighed. He watched Zarya as her frame retreated some distance away to the vantage point, and watched as Ardrea moved back through the camp, now relieved.

The conversation he had just had with Zarya was one he was trying to turn over in his head, a many-faceted and unexpectedly heavy thing for being so compact in a shell of innocuity. She was telling the truth on some of the salient points, specifically her age—the Galeborn were rarely seen outside of the Maelstrom since just after the end of the Great War, and so little and less about them was known in terms of how they functioned and aged; not to mention knowledge of their culture was sparse, mostly relating to their worship of a marine deity of some design by the name of Baaliqath, the Beast of Brine and Bone. Predictably, such knowledge was kept, twisted and disseminated by a number of religious authorities throughout history, framing them as reaving heretics making profane pacts to ill ends, but the fact remained that it was entirely possible she was indeed over six centuries old.

But more importantly, her speech was pointed, seemingly specifically at him.

Which begged the question—did she have a point? Was it possible that he could one day be seen as more than a lowborn upstart, a cutthroat and a rogue masquerading in fine clothes? Was it that simple? A friend to believe in him…was that really all he needed?

He shook his head a moment later. No. It was an idle fancy, nothing more. Casimir Hartigan, as far as the highborn and the well-to-do were concerned, was a snake in the grass, an adder poised to close around their ankles to their doom that lurked in the shadows, and that was all he would ever be.

Though he certainly wished it were otherwise.

What he wouldn’t give to have the opportunity to seize such a halcyon dream.

It’d be nice, I think, to have a true friend…

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

If Mami had to choose a word to describe the Principality of Maelnaulde as they approached the grandiose stone gates, it would be “massive.”

Everything about the city was gargantuan. The walls seemed to stretch halfway to the heavens, and the blocks of stone from which they were built were each the height of three Ophelias, stacked one atop the other. It was a marvel of engineering that in itself would have seemed worthy of what was once the largest city on the continent, every block humming with magical power to the degree where from even half a kilometre away it was like being in the orchestra pit of an opera house mid-performance. But even it was dwarfed by the glittering spire of the Silvern Basilica, which towered over the top of the walls and seemed to pierce the heavens at its highest point, a beacon that could be seen for dozens of kilometres in any direction upon approach. The entire structure was antediluvian and seemed wrought from argent metal, while to Mami’s eyes, the majority of the glare did not originate from the sun. The structure was so incomprehensibly massive and ancient that the aura of magic it had accumulated over time was more blinding than the sun itself, stark white and obviously divine in nature. No structure assembled by mortal hands, no matter how old or how grand, shone with quite that level of thaumaturgical purity.

At half a kilometre away, already the city walls seemed to extend without end in both directions, and though she knew the walls circled the city, the fact that they appeared to conform to a straight line to all but the most specific of scrutiny gave her an idea of just how large of an area was contained within its bounds. The sheer scale of the settlement itself boggled her mind, let alone how one ruler might see to it that all the people who surely lived there were even fed.

The throng of people coming into the city gates was immense and densely compacted, and given the fact that Maelnaulde’s elite Knights of the Order of the Crown was out in force, the silvered steel and enameled adamantite of the regulars and the preening scions of noble houses bounding along on raptors of varying prestige with regards to pedigree in parallel with the road, Mami felt it was safe to say that neither the Principality nor its people were used to being such a nexus of activity in the current day and age. The day itself was partly cloudy, and the sun on high beamed down on the travellers even as the cloud cover slid over and masked its invasive gaze every so often. The chattering all was up to a dull roar, and Mami was starting to struggle to deal with the overwhelming sensory input with which her horns were being bombarded by the time a special detachment of women, oddly enough, in strange white armoured garb edged with a mixture of jet and gold, led by a svelte elven boy caught firmly in the midst of the latter half of his adolescence, cut through the preening princoxes that held themselves with an air of undeserving authority, and stopped when they spotted Dorothea and their company.

“Ho there! Hail and well-met, Warriors of Light!” called the auburn-haired and gentle-featured boy, a raised fist clad in mail drawing his raptor riders up short. “My master, Dame Rienna, wishes to extend her utmost regrets that she could not afford to come escort you personally. If you shall forgive the insult, I am here in her stead. You may know me as Estinien, and I have the high honour of being Dame Rienna’s faithful squire.”

“Greetings, Squire Estinien. I am Dorothea, leader of the Warriors of Light, and these are my compatriots. May I present Ardrea of Zanthe, my paramour; Ser Ophelia, Knight of Vlindrel; Zarya Castracani, formerly of the Maelstrom; Mami of the Threefold Tomoe, noted healer and adherent to the Way of the White; and finally, the Grand Champion of the Burning Colosseum, Casimir Hartigan of Bantamoor,” Dorothea supplied easily, slipping from surprise into diplomacy with all the ease of a serpent shedding its skin.

“Well-received, all of you. And of course, congratulations on your new title, Messere Hartigan. Though we do not indulge in gladiatorial combat as a state, there are those in Maelnaulde who were quite…enthusiastic as it relates to you besting Leander Scylding on the blood-sands,” Estinien remarked with an awkward bow that went as low as it could while astride the raptor without tumbling off of the saddle to the ground. It was almost endearing. “Her Grace and Maelnaulde’s Radiant Sovereign Prince Mercédès bade me sally forth in such a manner that you might be conveyed directly to the Silvern Basilica so that she might receive you with all honours due such illustrious adventurers. To that end, my comrades shall bear you aloft and get you all hence. Swiftly now, if you will—one does not keep Her Grace waiting unduly.”

Mami did not fail to notice how the other entourages of Crown Knights muttered and grumbled amongst themselves as the six of them mounted the raptors, sitting behind Estinien’s soldiers on the large saddles, so she knew for a fact that neither did Dorothea. Tales of the heavily and exhaustively stratified society of Maelnaulde did not seem to be exaggerated, but the power of the prince seemed to have been grossly understated—or perhaps it was merely this particular prince who was so influential that despite the incensed grumbling of the obvious nobles within earshot and watching, not a one raised even a shadow of an objection to the situation openly. She could only surmise from this situation as it continued to unfold that the word of Prince Mercédès was holy writ.

The riders were silent as the grave as they checked to ensure that the six companions were properly secured, the five-limbed cross bracelets immediately catching Mami’s eye with how they passively radiated holy magic, and when the sentinels looked back up at Estinien, the squire took that as confirmation, executing a series of hand signals that had the detachment whirling around and spurring their raptors towards and through the city gates.

The cobblestone streets of Maelnaulde were bustling and busy, but at the cries of approaching raptors, the civilians going about their business dashed to gain way, while the procession didn’t even slow as it tore through square after square. The Bodice, as the district was called—Maelnaulde was divided into four major districts, with commerce in the Bodice, the upper crust in the Corset, the lower strata in the sprawling expanse of the Rouge, and finally the offices of government in the Coronet, a district dominated by the Silvern Basilica and its satellite buildings—was itself the size of a city, recorded at some seventy square kilometres, and as the third largest of the four, given that the only people who lived there were those with shops and guilds to exercise their trades within and without the means to demand land or grounds individually, to see it with that knowledge and pass through it even as a blur contextualised the true extremity of the scale in a way that boggled her mind.

Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

Before too much longer, perhaps two and a half hours’ worth of a steadily rapid pace, they drew up to the gates of the Coronet, an area under heavy guard and recorded as being restricted to just shy of invitation-only; yet the Crown Knights at the gate scarpered to let them pass unmolested at the sight of the white-and-jet- or white-and-gold-clad riders, and they swept through into what, to Mami’s eyes, looked almost like another city entirely. They had gone from a bustling urban settlement to what appeared for all the world to be the grounds of a monastery, sacred and sepulchral and humming with light magic, excited and seeming to almost spark from one surface to the next; and through its streets walked vaguely feminine figures of varying heights clad in white-and-red robes that looked almost like habits, the younger ones wearing silver chain bracelets with the charm of a three-limbed cross, and the older ones bearing a more conventional four-limbed version.

Drawing up to a commons area, the raptors were brought to a halt, as the silent sentinels dismounted from their saddles and unceremoniously aided the six Warriors of Light from their adopted perches to touch their feet to the ground. Estinien walked to stand before them again, giving a more proper bow at the waist with a flourish. “On the behalf of our Most Hallowed Sovereign, Prince Mercédès the First of House Lucerne, I bid you welcome to the Coronet. In a few moments, we will proceed to the Silvern Basilica, and you will be in the presence of Her Grace and His Excellency, the Grand Duke of Rosenfaire. For your own safety, I must ask that each of you observe all proper courtesies in the presence of Her Grace, His Excellency, and His Excellency’s esteemed sister. The nephilim may be women of few words, but they do not tolerate insolence in Her Grace’s court, doubly so with regards to rudeness to esteemed guests of Her Grace, and it is for this reason that I see the wisdom in warning you beforehand. To be blunt, the last thing the Principality needs is an international incident because one or more of the delegates failed to hold their tongue. Be advised, however, that this admonition is by no means unique to you, and it is indeed being given to other troupes of delegates at this very point before their own audiences with Her Grace. Now, do you all understand, or would you like me to repeat myself?”

Dorothea’s mouth began to open, but Ophelia smoothly cut in before their fatally clever leader had the opportunity to voice her thoughts.“I believe we are all well-apprised of how we are expected to comport ourselves within the walls of the Basilica, thank you.”

Mami shot Ophelia a look of gratitude while Dorothea did her best not to look put out by having her ‘fun’ ruined. The white mage pointedly ignored the fact that she could feel Zarya behind her struggling not to laugh, and redirected her attention directly at the youthful squire as he opened his mouth to speak.

“Excellent. Then without further ado, we shall proceed. If you all would be so kind as to follow me…”

Mami, Ardrea, Ophelia, and Zarya followed right on Squire Estinien’s heels, while Dorothea and Casimir hung back slightly, speaking in hushed yet harsh tones; the white mage did her level best to ignore it, focusing instead on how the nephilim group that had escorted them thus far seemed to disperse, pairing up and going their separate ways—Mami counted eight such pairs as they ascended the immaculate white stone steps before the doors of the Silvern Basilica loomed large in their path.

Walking through the front door of the impossibly large divine construct of a building, she was taken aback by the size and sheer, almost eldritch, scale of the interior of the structure. As large as the Basilica was on the exterior, it was many times larger within, to where the ceiling seemed to not even exist, shrouded in darkness beyond the limits of how far her eyes could see in a straight line. The windows were the size of buildings, the average one around six to eight stories high of stained glass arranged in an artistic fashion that was more realistic than she had thought would be possible given the medium, and though the sunlight shone through them freely and fully, the interior was still far too well-lit throughout to be illuminated naturally, and given the noticeable lack of torches, Mami could only assume that more subtle magic was involved, subtle magic that was noticeably drowned out by the roaring hum of the vast quantities of mana leaking freely from the walls of the ancient palace. And the corridors, well-lit though they were, seemed to similarly disappear just beyond her sight, despite the fact that she knew with absolute certainty that the exterior of the Silvern Basilica, massive though it was, did not extend for nearly that long in terms of base length and width.

There was little sense of time within the Basilica’s walls, and it could have been seconds just as easily as it could have been half an hour’s walk before they reached the double doors of the audience chamber, great wooden things that were formed in such a way that they looked to almost be part of a living growth. Then Estinien pressed his hand against the doors, and they swung open to reveal a chamber that could probably have mustered an army with quite a bit of space left over for some of the supplies. It was not so much the distance from the doors to the dais—considerable though it admittedly was—as it was the fact that the room felt that large, and more importantly, sounded like it, given how every sound seemed to echo endlessly throughout the space. The throne upon the dais seemed much larger and more grandiose than warranted—a taller woman could sit upon it and have her feet flat on the ground, of course, but it was still a ludicrous size for a structure that seemed to have been carved by a master artisan from a single massive pearl, leading Mami to wonder idly on what manner of mollusc could produce a pearl quite that large, not to mention the preternatural skill required of any artisan to be able to render so perfectly such a chair from such a material.

On one side of the throne stood a tall, muscled woman in plainclothes with short black hair, strong features, and piercing maroon eyes, while on the other stood a very different sort of person, a tall and lean man—an almost offensively pretty one at that—with an inimitable head of long violet hair, pulled back on one side and sweeping forth to frame his face with luxurious bangs on the other. His upturned eyes with their long, full lashes matched his hair exactly, and his suit of gold-accented ceremonial plate armour adopted the same hue; the livid scarlet of the rose he had pinned to his pauldron broke up the almost obnoxious parade of purple, and thus drew attention to it naturally as the eye slid to the single point of major contrast. While the woman on the left side of the throne when facing it kept her mouth in a solemn line, her eyes seemed to dance with mirth; the opposite could be said of the man on the right side, who smiled gregariously enough, but whose eyes might as well have been the gemstones they so resembled.

Before the dais and facing the doors, and thus the Warriors of Light as they approached, was a party of five that in one way or another bore the livery of Rosenfaire. That their number was five indicated strongly that they were, like Mami and her comrades, adventurers; yet, the city from which they seemed to hail did not have an adventuring company to sponsor, as it went against the charter of the associated guild. These, then, were indeed not at all adventurers, but must instead have been the five members of the Stormcrows, the personal guard of the Grand Duke of Rosenfaire.

The Stormcrows were an odd bunch, and if Mami had to choose, she would have picked out the athletic male with vibrant, fiery red hair in an effortlessly messy style that looked tousled and deceptively calm hazel eyes to be the leader, given his open confidence and gregarious grin that, like the violet man, concealed hidden depths; second on her list would have been the much colder girl, equally as athletic, with large green eyes and blonde hair styled into a chin-length bob cut. It took her a moment to notice the much shorter lavender-haired girl, slight and small in height and build, mousey in stature and so mild in presence that she seemed almost about to blend into the background, but once she did, Mami did not miss the fact that those iron-grey eyes of hers did not dart so quickly out of simple nerves, but rather fixed themselves on each of the Warriors of Light, as though preemptively targeting them.

The remaining two were complete mysteries to Mami, not because she could not read anything from them, but because she honestly could not tell how much, if anything, she read from them was real. Crimson hair and eyes characterised the first, a woman of indeterminable age with an air of overt inscrutability and mischief, garbed in a crimson-and-yellow raiment that was loud and confrontational in its eccentricity, most notably the knee-high high-heeled boots with long tips that curled upwards and the high-collared red cloak that cascaded down to just above her ankles. Her hair was pinned up at the top of her head in a tail, but that did not seem to remotely dispel the very yōkai-esque aura that radiated from her with her almost Cheshire grin that Mami would not be surprised if she were to learn was permanently plastered on. The other’s hair was black as night, pinned lower near the nape of her neck and hanging over a slim shoulder, much leaner in build than the blonde woman, the only one of the four females of comparable height, with bright, almost feral hazel eyes that, together with her frame and bearing, lent her a dark, lupine sort of menacing appeal.

Then, the one she had been avoiding regarding drew her eye, and as though against her will, she found herself staring at the reclined posture of one who could only be the prince.

Since awakening in this world of strange sorcery-based anachronisms and ancient unspoken secrets that she was still trying to unravel even now, Mami of the Threefold Tomoe had seen quite a few people dressed in what looked like authentic clothing from the medieval period in the west—which was fitting, she supposed, given much of the technology ordinary people native to this world relied upon in their day to day lives—but this was new. Never before had anyone she had seen, regardless of gender or sex, worn such a costume so effortlessly as Her Grace, Mercédès Charlotte Lucerne, Prince of Maelnaulde.

Of a shade with Mami’s own, her raven hair was bound in a thick, somewhat loose, low braid that pooled slightly in her lap, where one leg was crossed over the other beneath her thin but not sheer skirts, while her glimmering golden eyes that seemed to shine with their own inner light pinned Mami to the spot as she met them. Her dress, which concealed almost every visible centimetre below the moderately suggestive neckline, was royal blue and jet black, accented with copious threads of spun gold filigree, and her neck was enclosed in an artfully delicate silver collar that embraced a large scarlet gem that swirled with magic. And her face…Mami was not fooled by that gentle, softly smiling, pious visage, not for even a fraction of an instant.

“Greetings, Warriors of Light. I bid you feel welcome in these halls,” the prince called forth, her eyes dancing with something Mami could not pin down long enough to definitively identify as she nodded her head slightly in acknowledgement. “It is likely that you are all aware of who I am, but for courtesy’s sake, I shall say that I am Mercédès Lucerne, and I have been blessed with the honour of serving the Principality of Maelnaulde as their immaculate sovereign. And may I present Dame Rienna tol Ciencia, beloved mother and peerless knight, together with Lucien Hauteclaire Galatyn of the Heirs of Zilart, Grand Duke of Rosenfaire.”

The austere yet beautiful woman in plainclothes, Dame Rienna, nodded, while the man on the opposite side of the throne stepped forth and gave a bow appropriate to the social disparity between himself and the adventurers Mami called friends. “Thank you, Your Grace. By your leave should I like to introduce the members of my guard.”

“You have it,” said the prince, her voice light with mirth as she offered forth her hand.

“You have my gratitude,” said the Grand Duke, standing before the prince a few steps down and bowing much lower, taking her hand and pressing a chaste, reverent, and solemn kiss to her knuckles. Then he rose and turned to regard the adventurers, indicating his troupe of guards with a flourish. “Now then, to the illustrious Warriors of Light whose deeds defy the telling and whose reputation precedes them, shall I present Rosenfaire’s own Stormcrows.”

Up first came the eccentric woman in red and yellow, stepping forth jauntily and with an air of dance in her gait. Her bow was so exaggerated it bordered on mockery, and when she spoke, it was sweet like honey, but beneath it was a razor’s edge of what Mami would hazard to call ‘madness’, and as she rose and winked with a giggle, propping her index finger at the edge of her smugly smirking lips, the entire image was less cute and more profoundly disturbing. “Greetings, o Warriors of Light. I am called Krile, She of the Radiant Raiment. It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance. I’m sure we’ll all be the very best of friends!”

“You really don’t need to be talking their ears off, Krile,” came the words of the young woman with inky blue-black hair and the surly expression into which her face seemed permanently set. She stepped forth, the tails of her shin-length high-collared black coat, belted around her waist and carrying two daggers, flowing like a living shadow and obscuring her frame, aided by her long, grey-and-black striped scarf. Her firm black boots were flat on the ground, and each step she took was solid and sure as she raised one of her dextrous hands clad in fingerless gloves to brush a fringe of black hair out of her eyes, using the other to indicate herself with a thumb. “Name’s Rydia. I’m a swordsman. So is Krile, but she didn’t seem to think it was particularly relevant to inform you of this. The blonde and the redheaded pain in my ass, that is Aranea and Gareth here, are great with spears and lances, while Junna is a crack-shot with a bow. And despite appearances, Gareth, Krile, and I are the only ones who are really any good with magic.”

“Specifically black magic for Rydia and myself,” said the redhead, Gareth, who seemed all the more intimidating in his well-fitting black armour, making his easy and gregarious swagger as he stepped forth seem to resonate with inner darkness and overt deception. “Krile just kinda does whatever.”

The woman so named shrugged her shoulders with a muffled giggle. “I’ll heal you if you’re lucky, and annihilate your enemies if they’re not!”

“Yes, thank you all for speaking for the group,” Aranea interjected, her voice one of those ones that seemed able to switch from kind to strict and back again on a gil. The blonde woman sighed. “As you’ve been no doubt told, I’m Aranea of the Stormcrows. I’m also our only flier, given that I got my start in Rosenfaire’s own Falcon Knights. I’m also decent enough with a lance on the back of a pegasus.”

“What she’s not telling you is the fact that her nickname in the Falcon Knights was the Savage Valkyrie,” Gareth remarked with a wry twist to his mouth.

“I think we’ve been quite unorthodox enough with introductions without stating our service records, don’t you, Death’s Own?” Aranea shot back, her tone cutting.

“Fair enough,” Gareth said with a nod. “And our last member here is Junna.”

The last woman stepped forth, brushing her long, thick lavender hair back, and when she spoke, her voice was soft, but it was strong and wrought from the iron her eyes resembled. “Yes, I’m Junna. I might not be very good with magic or flying or swordplay, but I’ve never missed a shot in my entire career. I very much intend to maintain that record.”

“With that, I would have you all know and keep in mind moving forward that only those herein assembled have the authority to move into and out of the Basilica freely. So if, during your stay, anyone who is not currently in this room comes to retrieve you, you should be aware that they did not do so by my command, and thus should be treated with extreme caution. With the influx of travellers here to witness the festivities, there are certain to be a large variety of unsavoury sorts milling about,” explained the prince with an indulgent smile. “Now, once again, we here welcome you to our fair city, and we trust that with your illustrious reputation, you will act unerringly with dignity and grace while within our walls. The Stormcrows are here to be introduced to you as they shall not be participating in the tourney, and instead shall be directing all persons of import to wherever they desire or feel the need to go—within reason, of course. At this moment, however, they shall escort you safely to lodgings that have been secured for the duration of your visit, as I am certain you five must be quite eager to find adequate creature comforts within reach once more, and to rest your travel-weary heads. The tourney shall be in four days’ time, and so I wish you all the best of luck, and that the odds may ever be in your favour.”

Wait… Five?!

Mami looked around, and caught a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach the moment she realised their unofficial sixth member, Casimir, was nowhere to be found. She turned her head to Dorothea, who looked at her with an expression that, to anyone who didn’t live in close proximity to her day in and day out, would look like proof that she had no idea what was going on; yet, Mami could see the slightly calculating glint in her eye, and knew that something incredibly dumb had just occurred, and if it went wrong, they were all going to be paying for it.

“The Stormcrows and myself, I’m afraid,” the Grand Duke interjected, pressing a hand to his breastplate and bowing at the waist to the woman on the pearl throne. “My apologies, Your Grace, for while I certainly find your presence agreeable and your conversation stimulating, I find that the strain of travel lingers still. The travails of travelling such a distance, I’m afraid—the act thereof is a trial unlike any other, especially taken at such a pace as we did.”

“You need not explain yourself further, my dear friend,” the prince replied, the very image of divine grace to the point where Mami felt nauseous bearing witness to it. “You have my leave to see yourself abed. I am certain the Stormcrows would not mind an extra stop on their route for the sake of guarding their liege lord, would you not agree?”

“My thanks, Your Grace,” the foreign sovereign said, rising from his bow and turning in a stately fashion to wave his guards to his side; then, the six began to proceed out of the doors of the audience chamber, sweeping up the Warriors of Light into their entourage, and as the Silvern Basilica’s throne room was shuttered from her sight, Mami could have sworn she spotted the prince winking at her and blowing a kiss. She shook her head.

Must have been my imagination.

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

“What was that about?”

Mercédès, Charlotte to her family, chuckled softly as she reclined into her surprisingly comfortable chair, not moving her eyes for even a moment as she waited for her friend to present herself in her sight. The prince, after all, did not look for people; people endeavoured to be seen by the prince—and even when it was only the two of them, given that if she was choosing to approach, Mother must have begged off, the habit was all but impossible to break. Not that she was especially inclined to attempt it, of course. Only her family got that out of her. “My dear, whatever makes you think it had to be about anything?”

“Because I know you, Your Grace,” came the high, sickly sweet voice of her ‘intended,’ Jeanne Evalach Galatyn, Duchess and Heiress Presumptive to Rosenfaire, as she was known to the mortals for whose benefit it behooved them to maintain the illusion that concealed the truth of their nature. “You and your sister both, you’re always plotting something—even when you’re not actually plotting anything, in her case. Whatever it is, I want in, so spill.”

This time, Charlotte did move to regard the younger woman, her Rose Bride. Like her elder brother, her hair was violet and cascaded in a straight wave down her back when left loose, which was obvious even though she secured it up in a pair of twin-tails with small ribbons that were rendered invisible with how they were buried in the binding, though she did not share his eyes. Instead, hers were a deep emerald, a direct contrast and a bit of playful ribbing between the two siblings. Charlotte looked her up and down in open suggestion, and saw, as expected, that while above the waist, Jeanne was observing all the proper courtly rules of fashion, her skirts were incredibly short, exposing the expanse of milky thigh that she was all too comfortable flaunting with her peculiar breed of irreverence and flippancy.

It was hardly becoming of an archangel for her to dress that way, she knew; yet, neither Charlotte nor Jeanne were particularly predisposed to caring on that score. She leaned forward, and gently took Jeanne’s chin in her grasp, lifting her face until their eyes met, and she could see the moisture beading up in the younger woman’s sockets.

“I am certain I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Charlotte enunciated, crisp and clear, utterly unmistakable; then, she retracted her hand and placed her fingers on Jeanne’s forehead, pushing her back a few steps.

“Fine, then. Keep your secrets,” she sighed, though neither of them believed for a moment that Jeanne’s troublesome curiosity was satisfied, and they both knew it. Operational security, however, was something they both understood, and which was very much germane to the current circumstances, even if she could not safely divulge how—partly because she truly did not know, and that was entirely by design. “More importantly, did you see who they were with?”

“I did,” allowed the prince as she settled back once more, fully at rest.

“…And?”

“No news.”

From how Jeanne’s expression changed, she obviously caught the sobriety in Charlotte’s tone. Not that Charlotte had any reasonable expectation that she wouldn’t, of course, and would have been genuinely surprised had that come to pass. “What are we going to do, then? Something has to break.”

“There’s quite a lot brewing in Maelnaulde right now as it stands, and we need to wipe it away before we adopt any more specific strategies. I’m hoping that the resolution of the upcoming trials will eventually present us with the opening we’ve been waiting for.” Charlotte sighed. “Beyond that, however, I don’t know. Vlindrel is still shrouded in fog, and that same fog continues to swallow anyone who tries to pierce its veil. We’ve learned a great deal about its nature by way of examining the permanently vegetative husks it makes of the remains of those who attempted scrying through it, but beyond that, we’re dead in the water at the moment.”

“This can’t continue, Mistress. Something has to give,” Jeanne insisted.

“I’m well aware, Marie!” Charlotte replied, reining herself in immediately when she heard how testy that sounded to her own ears. No, it would not do to lose her composure, not even in front of Marie, the name of the woman she knew laid beneath the guise of Jeanne, just as she worked beneath the thin veneer that was Mercédès Lucerne, and as her parents, Rienna and Marique, had done before her. “I’m well aware. I’m well aware that the love of my life and our daughter were lost the day that fog descended. I’m well aware that we’re more than likely on a timer before they wind up dead or worse. The fact remains that until the situation becomes clearer, my hands are tied…”

“My apologies, Mistress, I…” Marie began.

“…Are in no way at fault, Marie,” Charlotte interrupted, rubbing at her temples to try and massage some of the stress away so that she could think clearly. Charlotte did not care much for most people—even amusements like Sonja were only that. But Emily Greywing, the Crown Princess of the Kingdom of Vlindrel, had always managed to unmake her, always and invariably, in a way that few others could manage. Whenever she awoke to tear-stained pillows, or simply could not find sleep, it was the spectres of Emily and their daughter, Althia, born the very same day the fog descended, and the images her mind could conjure of the worst fates that could befall them that left the imprint of their long, cold fingers writhing like maggots in her mind. “I… Freya would know how to deal with this. She was always useless in court, but would know exactly what to do about this sort of situation. I don’t… I never had quite the genius for war she possesses.”

“No one does, Mistress,” Marie stated as she grew closer, attempting a soothing tone the way she always did when Charlotte’s missing sister, the demon Freya, came up in conversation, historically to widely varying degrees of success. “There’s a reason she’s known to be the best, and it’s certainly not through exaggeration or idle boasting. But we’ll get through this. You’re not alone anymore—I’m here with you, see? And between our pooled resources, we’ll either find a way out of this situation, or we’ll find your sister and get her to solve it for us. That’s why I’m here, remember? Me and my brother both. We’re here for you, and will aid you every step of the way. After all, isn’t that what vassals are for?”

And it has nothing to do with you wanting to see yourself in nuptial regalia, I’m sure, Charlotte thought to herself, not unkindly; Marie’s open and irrepressible vanity was one of her best traits in how cavalier she was in the display of what others might consider flaws or otherwise undesirable. Charlotte lived for the games of court, of plots within plots, of snares layered within snares, of counters and circumventions and underminings, just as Freya lived for war and every aspect of battle and conflict. Both of them were virtuosos who had elevated their craft to an art form—Freya being a master of murder, while Charlotte was a master of manipulation—but even Freya needed to enjoy times of peace, and likewise, Charlotte found Marie’s transparency a refreshing way to cleanse her palate. “Yes, I suppose you are correct. Thank you, Marie.”

“Of course. I’d like to think I’m your friend as well as your vassal,” Marie replied.

Charlotte arched a brow. “My dearest friend, I do believe that is a sentiment that your brother would decry as improper for one of your station!”

“Yeah, well, fuck him,” Marie said simply.

“I’d really rather not.”

“Ew. You know what I mean.”

“I do indeed,” said Charlotte; then she paused, leaning in and whispering conspiratorially into Marie’s ear. “I also do believe I can hear the beating of a tell-tale heart. Vermin, then, furtively skittering through the walls, scavenging their way through my bounty. Let us see, then, if the rat-catchers are equal to the task…”

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

Why do I continue to get myself into such obvious disaster scenarios? I told her it was a trap, didn’t I? Yes, I did. It was painfully obvious that it was a trap—she couldn’t possibly have missed the signs. But did she listen? Oh no! Use this opportunity to slip into the Silvern Basilica, Casimir, she said! It’ll be great, she said! Go off without a fucking hitch, she said! Fuck!

These were the exact thoughts that ran through Casimir Hartigan’s mind as he pressed himself painfully against the walls of yet another alcove, holding his breath and forcing his heart to slow as yet more of the nephilim stalked right by his position. A master thief such as he should have known to call off the heist the moment he saw the target, laid eyes upon the massive gleaming structure scraping the heavens menacingly, far above him; he ought to have known immediately that the Silvern Basilica, having obviously not been crafted by mortal hands, was under no obligations to follow the logic of literally every other establishment, high-profile or otherwise, that he had ever successfully robbed blind—which was a very, very long list, thank you very much. And he did, which was what galled him; he knew exactly how awful of an idea this was, how terrible this heist would more than likely turned out, he wasn’t an idiot, he didn’t get this far by choosing gambles he had any significant chance of losing.

Yet despite this knowledge, Dorothea had managed to talk him into it. To follow through, in the spirit of his newfound kinship with Mami, as though Mami herself would have asked him to do this and he hadn’t volunteered, as if she would not have seen this was eleven malms of bad news and told him in no uncertain terms he was not allowed to go off snooping. He knew all that in retrospect, of course, but for the memory of that moment, and not for the first time, Casimir Hartigan cursed the fact that he had such a charismatic friend. Indeed, he cursed it up and down, by the gods above, and the gods below.

The amount of close calls he had had thus far was nothing short of alarming, together with the hair-raising feeling every cutpurse knew to recognise as the first and last warning they would get that things were about to go ridiculously wrong—the almost spectral sensation of being watched, of course—that had begun shortly after he broke off, and persisted even in sections of his route where there was no possibility that anyone was watching him. Despite this he could sense himself under scrutiny, under the withering regard of a lidless eye, patient and inexorable, wreathed in flame with how it seemed to sear into the nape of his neck like the tender kiss of a branding-iron. Something had been profoundly wrong since the start—he was a professional, he didn’t get jitters, and so he couldn’t possibly be imagining it—and yet the sunken cost of his infiltration even to this point was damning enough that he could not justify to himself the risk he would incur by bailing out right then. The irony did not escape him that in deciding it was too risky to turn back and thus continuing, the risk he would incur by turning back continued to multiply, moment by moment, like the albatross of an old man around his neck that grew progressively heavier.

Compared to the feeling of eyes upon him, the close calls were significantly easier to navigate; he might even have enjoyed himself over the challenge, if the acuity of the senses of the nephilim were remotely within the realm of what was possible for even the most remarkable mortals to achieve when they were listening for something they expected to hear, let alone simply in passing. Stalking the corridors was a little dicey because sometimes nephilim would come from junctions he had looked at and not seen, and sometimes from halls he had not only seen, but thoroughly checked to make sure were empty, and in the latter case, they came too quickly for them to have not been there beforehand, despite the evidence of his senses—senses he was, despite himself, beginning to seriously doubt.

If there was one thing to be thankful for, it was his disdain for magical forms of stealth. So many footpads swore by it and considered him a relic for his abstinence; yet, he had always found that magically muffling one’s footfalls left an almost imperceptible distortion, a slight absence of sound no one believed he had been able to pick out, even when he had demonstrated that aptitude exhaustively. Here, he had cause to believe that his staunch traditionalism with regards to his craft had saved his hide and had been the only way he had gotten as deep into the bowels of the seemingly unending structure as he had—given the sheer oddity of the situation, both aforementioned and unsaid, he had taken it as a given that the nephilim could have picked out the disparity much more keenly than him, and perhaps could even sense the presence of foreign magic as a beleaguered mariner could spot a lighthouse beacon. As it stood, however, it took every iota of his painstakingly-obtained skills of stealth and infiltration to remain at least as undetected as his own senses could verify as he slinked from shadow to shadow, from alcove to corner and then back again before any passers-by could reasonably spot him—a qualification that existed in open defiance of what his honed instincts were screaming at him incessantly with every step he took.

He padded quickly and quietly, as swiftly as he dared and as subtly as he could manage, around a corner, then two, then three, trying to get a sense of the layout; on the fourth turn that ought to have brought him back to his point of origin, he was in a completely different place than he ought to have been. With the distance he had travelled, he ought to have ended up ten paces away from the first turn; instead, he found himself in a long hallway, panelled with glass on all the walls up to the ceiling, rendered invisible by its distance; yet, instead of being reflective, this glass was all opaque, and though it had the shimmer of glass, it showed a similar image to that of matte metal.

Damn my rampant curiosity. It’s as much at fault for this as Dorothea for getting me in this unholy mess… he reflected, cursing himself honestly as he began to walk down the odd corridor as though drawn by the gentle but insistent tug of some irresistible force.

He continued past the walls, even after he realised that it wasn’t that they weren’t reflective, simply that they were not reflecting him, and down the marble flooring even as small motes of frost began to appear out of the corner of his eye, then not being there when he regarded them fully; and at the end of the corridor, there was a door. A large set of double-doors that his instincts immediately informed him was likely an atelier or treasury of some sort, no less, sat before him, looming ever larger with each step he took.

It was like something out of one of the storybooks he had stolen as a child, staring at the pictures uncomprehendingly, a tale out of myth of a forbidden passage beyond which the heroine must not step, containing as it did such enthralling mystery and tremendous sorrow that to look upon it was to proffer her very soul as tender in exchange. It was a cautionary symbol seemingly out of every childhood fantasy and dark, grisly legend of monsters and magic, and it appealed to that childish part of him he had thought long since dead and buried, the one who had once looked to the sky with hope, who had wished for the hunger pangs to stop with the blind faith that his prayers would one day be answered, only to have them betrayed over and over again with an almost gleefully spiteful malice.

It exhumed that lost and forgotten part of himself, reanimated, resurrected, and pulled inexorably to press his hands against the doors, pushing them open as though in a trance, and crossing the threshold beyond which all was dangerous and unknown, tragic and forbidden.

Casimir Hartigan did not notice the doors sweeping shut behind him, however, and nor did he notice the many items an obnoxiously wealthy collector would sell his soul for even one of that were lying on display about the vast chamber; instead, his gaze was fixed on the thing in the centre of the room, on a raised dais.

It was a mirror, he surmised; not one of glass, but carved by hands beyond mortality from Stygian ice into a slab that mimicked a mirror in every respect save for the flaws that invariably came from things crafted by the hands of those doomed to one day die. It was beautiful in a horrific, alien way that caused pain akin to that of an iron spike to be driven into the invisible spot behind his eye when he gazed upon it, though he could not look away, and nor could he particularly muster up the desire to do so.

The dais was raised and the steps were articulated well enough to afford traversal; thus did he ascend to the platform upon which the icy mirror stood, tall, ephemeral, and beckoning with a sense of unknowable temptation, of abomination that turned an eye of passive indifference upon the mortal realm and by its very existence drove men to gibbering madness. He stood, then, at last with only breath separating him from the ice, which radiated such a chill that he ventured his very marrow was soon to be coated in frost too cold to ever truly melt; yet, despite the physical sensation of the cold, he was transfixed, completely mesmerised at the sight of it.

For mirror though it may have been, Casimir nonetheless saw not his own image reflected in its abyssal depths, and instead what he looked upon was the image of a castle.

In terms of the sheer, terrifying absurdity of its construction, the Silvern Basilica looked like a common townhouse compared to the fortress he beheld; the land in which it rested was benighted, battered with a whirling blizzard that blanketed the ground in what appeared to be several metres of white snow, and being this close, he could even hear the echoes of how the winds howled, violent and merciless, like a freshly widowed woman’s heartrending wail. Yet, despite this, and despite the white-out that would have made it difficult for Casimir to see his hand in front of his face through its driving, immaculate blanket, he could see the castle quite clearly. Its towering walls, black and proud, rose forbiddingly out of the white, enclosing a city many times the size of Maelnaulde, perhaps the size of a country in and of itself; so it was a testament to the castle’s size, then, that it remained clearly visible from even his distant vantage, spiralling to the sky with slender spires that must have numbered in the many hundreds, perhaps even thousands, piercing the bleak heavens in their dizzying heights.

And in that moment, Casimir knew that what he was looking upon was not an image meant for mortal eyes to see—for as he stared at the castle…

…He could feel the castle staring back.

Tearing his eyes away with a great effort, aided in large part by the cloak of sheer uncomprehending dread that settled about him like a funeral shroud, cloying and constricting, the Grand Champion, consummate survivor that he was, staggered back, stumbling over himself as he turned away from the structure’s curious gaze, from the mirror’s wonder so ancient and grand and unknowable that ‘profoundly distressing’ was far too small a descriptor, and fled. Blind to all the room’s adornments that now seemed to jeer and scorn him for peeking beyond the veil that shielded mortal men from all that which was so profoundly beyond their ken as to give them an inkling of their true transitory insignificance, he ran, heedless of stealth, across the now seemingly infinite expanse between the dais and the door. Running like hellhounds snapped at his heels, he finally reached the threshold, pulling the doors open as he tasted true freedom.

But like anything else good about his life, it only lasted long enough for him to realise what it was before it was snatched away.

A ghastly grinning face white as marble with long crimson hair pinned in a high tail was the width of a blade from him, and the eyes that bored into his were blazing scarlet in a sea of pitch black, run through with veins of livid, unnatural red that made a brambled halo around the eye sockets in the deathly corpse-flesh. A giggle that was equal parts insane and psychopompous emanated from Death’s mouth of savage mirth, together with a couplet of words that doused Casimir’s final embers of hope.

“You’ll do.”

Then the pale grey corpse-lips seized his own in a fraction of an instant, and in his mind, a livid, wretched nightbloom reached full flourish…

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

“I suppose I must apologise for thinking so highly of you.”

Mami found herself very quickly amending her ranking of the Silvern Basilica on the hierarchy of places she never wanted to find herself within again.

Of course, Casimir’s beaten and bloody body sprawled in a prone heap on the floor, breathing weakly and still with a pulse—she had checked—was aiding her greatly in that revised assessment. And it was a credit to the grave, sepulchral severity of the situation that even Dorothea found her quick tongue and razor wit dried and shrivelled, without even the barest of quips to put forth in an ill-advised attempt at lightening the mood with antagonism.

Not that Mami could blame her; given the fact that it was the morning after their arrival, and therefore they had been in Maelnaulde for less than a day, the fact that her machinations had landed them squarely on the prince of Maelnaulde’s personal shit list simply must have been the setting of a new and ambitious record regarding the speed with which her prodding had moulded the situation into the approximate shape of a pear.

Prince Mercédès sat, stately, serene, and unerringly severe, upon her pearl throne, with none of the joviality, playfulness, or graciousness of the day before to be found anywhere on her visage or in the posture of her body. She appeared for all the world to be the image of the ideal of nobility, an immutable arbiter of justice so poised, and the metallic gold of her eyes pinned them both in a very different fashion from the day before, though dressed and adorned in similar, almost identical, fashion. Around them were a few of the nephilim, none of whom Mami particularly recognised, but all of whom regarded the pair with silent scorn—the remaining three of their number having not been called for, and thus forced to remain confined to their lodgings for the time being—together with who Mami could only assume was the sister of Grand Duke Lucien, Duchess Jeanne of Rosenfaire, and thus the bride for the upcoming nuptials, dressed in a manner that was at once aggressively provocative and passively warlike, and perched with her rear resting atop one of the arms of the pearl throne.

“I appear to have done you a disservice by overestimating your faculties to such a drastic extent. I beg your indulgence,” continued the prince, her tone calm and placid but still biting and profoundly insincere. “Though I suppose it matters very little whether or not you deign to absolve me. I am more than capable of extracting forgiveness from you by force if I so wish. Correct me if I am mistaken, but are you not at least partly at fault for your companion’s current state, Dorothea?”

Dorothea flinched so hard she seemed to almost stagger, which perplexed and unnerved Mami in equal measure.

“Take your time. It’s not as though I have any obligations or duties to attend to, after all,” the prince encouraged, the frost in her airy tone a veiled admonition all its own. “I suppose I owe you some level of gratitude for such a state of affairs coming to pass. It’s almost amusing, in a way—I had never thought to see a rabbit fastening its own snare. It is, in truth, a wondrous sight all its own. Though I suppose you had thought yourself the hunter in this little fable! It would be hilarious in its own absurdity were it not so profoundly unfortunate—though I must admit, I shall laugh regardless. But where are my manners? I have been filling with my own words the empty space where your grovelling should be. Go on, then—the floor is yours, to kneel or posture upon as you see fit.”

Mami was taken aback by the gleeful savagery in the prince’s smirk as those golden eyes that seemed to see entirely too much bored holes into Dorothea’s skull. Dorothea, in turn, wore an expression that was so uncharacteristically blank that it might as well have been an unliving effigy carved in stone relief, if not for her eyes flickering almost too quickly to follow in an attempt to, Mami assumed, locate every guard in the room, for all the good such considerations would do either of them at this point. Dorothea seemed to stir into motion to comply, lowering herself onto her knees, until she halted halfway through the motion and said, clearly and with perfect elocution, “Twenty-six.”

“Twenty-five, actually,” the prince replied with an air of insouciance so thick Mami believed it qualified as a fog as the sovereign checked her nails superciliously. “The last one is actually a statue, believe it or not.”

The nephilim exchanged looks with each other at this dialogue, and though their unspoken language was beyond Mami’s understanding, she could see her own confusion mirrored clearly in their bearings.

“You may leave us, ladies,” the prince commanded. “I have no further need of your skills at the moment, and each of you gossips as though you were thrice your age. And do remember to take the effigy with you in the course of egress, please and thank you.”

The nephilim bowed reverently and quickly began to file out of the chamber into the long shadows of the morning. The moment the last of them receded from the bounds of the room, Dorothea chuckled mirthlessly. “Forgive me, but I honestly had begun to believe you chronically disinclined to poke fun at me in such a manner.”

Mami could hold her tongue no further. “Are either of you ever going to stop speaking in riddles?!”

“They don’t seem particularly inclined to,” said Duchess Jeanne for the first time since they’d entered, her voice like the bubblegum of Haruhi’s youth, sweet but cloying and more than prepared to stick in your throat to suffocate you slowly if navigated carelessly. “But trust me, you get used to it.”

“I appreciate the vote of confidence, darling,” the prince jested, the genuine twist of her lips hinting strongly at a concealed in-joke.

“So how much trouble am I actually in?” Dorothea asked.

“Far more than you’d like to be,” replied the sovereign with a shrug of her shoulders. “But then again, I’ve never known that not to be the case with you, so I doubt such a response is particularly illustrative of the pitfalls of the current situation into which you have so gracefully stumbled. Whatever did you hope to accomplish, by the by, that you would sacrifice this man you have professed to have befriended in such a callous manner?”

“Dorothea, do you have something to tell me…?” Mami asked, her voice somewhere between a hiss and a snarl.

“Dorothea hosts about her neck so very many varieties of albatross that I am continually surprised breath yet finds its way into her lungs, and so I’d imagine she has quite a bit to divulge. It is, however, unfortunately not the time for such discussions—indeed, time is something of which we have very little at present,” said Prince Mercédès, her bearing all business.

“I wanted to see how you’d react,” Dorothea replied blithely. “How are we to play this game of shadows, after all, if we lack pieces on the board?”

“How quaint,” the prince remarked with a long-suffering expression. “But you ought not to aggrandise yourself too thoroughly, Dorothea—the victor of this match was decided before you even stepped up to the table, I’m afraid.”

“Says the woman who brought in a statue specifically to throw me off,” Dorothea retorted.

“We all have our little amusements to break up the monotony,” the prince said, unmoved. “Yours appears to be wasting my time.”

Dorothea gaped open-mouthed, her jaw flexing uncomprehendingly before snapping shut with a soft clack. “Well, with that, I suppose I shall take my leave that I might find a salve for my burns.”

“Be certain to acquire a spade while you’re at it, and keep it once you believe yourself to be done—knowing you, I have little doubt you’ll have significant need of it afore long.” The prince waved off the leader of the Warriors of Light, who bowed low and made a very swift withdrawal, looking for all the world like a sundered army quitting the field. And then the prince’s gaze of molten aurum fell upon Mami, with Mami alone left to bear it, even as the sovereign rose from her throne gracefully and began to approach with a stately, measured pace that nonetheless caused the white mage to feel suddenly very hemmed in. “So…boats.”

Suddenly, she was drowning. She couldn’t breathe. She was on land, but she could not breathe, and despite the evidence of her senses, her mind insisted that if she inhaled, no air would enter her lungs, only water, black and cold and Stygian as the grave of four times fifty mariners given to the restless deep. The knowledge that the prince was undergoing similar turmoil before her very eyes brought no comfort, only further blank confusion, and that remained even as the sensation released, sending them both to all fours, panting and gasping for air, their lungs working uselessly to dislodge imaginary seawater.

“Why would you do that to yourself?!” Mami protested.

“So that we might understand each other better, Selene.”

Mami stilled, something dark and old and unknown, at once benediction and psychopomp woven about each other as a caduceus, shifting and slithering beneath her skin. “…How do you know that name…?”

“I had your curiosity with the first demonstration. I am pleased to have secured your attention with the second,” Prince Mercédès replied as she stood once more, smoothing out the sudden wrinkles in her dress and piecing back together the image of the immaculate sovereign. “As to your question, I know that name as intimately as I do my own. After all, are we not, as our mutual friend once said, sisters in this Covenant of the Dark?”

“I have but one sister, and you are not she,” Mami hissed.

The prince sighed. “You are correct, but only by half. We have but one sister, and she is not I, nor is she thee. She was stolen from us, dearest sister, but I have found her. I have found our dear Profane Nightmother—I have found our dear…”

“…Freya,” Mami interjected, breathing the name out reverently, as though that collection of syllables was more precious and vital to her than gold. “Freya…Selene… Charlotte?!”

“In the flesh,” Charlotte said, smiling wanly. “Though I suppose it’s too much to hope for your memories to be restored to any appreciable capacity beyond that, so that much shall have to suffice, at least at present.”

“I am so confused…”

“Well within acceptable parameters, I assure you,” Charlotte sighed. “Or at least, so that wretched Farseeker has told me. They are wholly Freya’s creature, and so can be trusted implicitly, but it does not make them any less vexing to be around.”

“Farseeker…?” Mami asked, her tongue twisting around the familiar shape of the unfamiliar title.

“You’ve met them before,” said Charlotte. “They travel in the guise of Krile, ‘She of the Radiant Raiment,’ but in truth, they are, at least currently, known as Loki, of the Four Fiends.”

“Okay, I was going to be quiet when you insulted me—your pride is not worth your mission, Loki, I said to myself—but excuse you, Not-My-Real-Mom?!”

An unfamiliar voice made Mami jump and whirl around, and when she spotted nothing and whirled back, there Charlotte was, her face in her hand, while what was ostensibly a woman stood off to the side there, staring at the prince and looking quite thoroughly put out. And when Mami recognised the garish red-and-yellow garments together with the crimson hair, she gasped. “Krile?!”

The individual turned to face the white mage, now, and the animated rictus with its pale, ghastly flesh and blue-grey lips was shocking enough; the eyes, however, very nearly undid her, blazing scarlet in black sclera riddled with livid red veins that seemed to carry something far more sinister and malefic than blood, with how the veins brambled and webbed out into the immediate area of the eye socket, pulsing and throbbing grotesquely. The overdone expression of exasperation followed by a sigh so heavy it could only be performative mockery twisted the face in a way that belied its obvious mortific complexion so thoroughly that Mami was suddenly very much unconvinced even a living face could be so exaggerated and dramatic. “Yes, I am Loki. I had hoped to keep the deception going for a while longer, but it seems Sister Killjoy over here just couldn’t let me have my fun!”

“Loki here has been instrumental in the endeavour of locating our sister,” Charlotte explained in a tight voice, using a hand to indicate the walking corpse. “Their judgement has proven sound so far, and so I have elected to bow to their superior expertise in this arena. But the situation is tenuous at best—we balance on a knife’s edge—and enemies some of us had hoped could remain forgotten shall soon come forth from the woodworks to put an end to our quest. This cannot be allowed to happen, obviously, but with your station in our coterie, all our preparation could come to naught were you to misstep even unknowingly.”

“Mother thinks the world of you both. It is by her directive that either of you yet draw breath, despite my own misgivings on the matter—but as long as her orders that both of you be kept safe and out of danger stand, I supposed you could at least make yourselves useful and aid me in my duties. I hope, for your sake, that her faith in you both is not misplaced, of course. However,” and here the corpse grinned, undying malice radiating from too-white teeth, “I shall stand prepared should she give me leave, and believe me, nothing would make me happier than to eliminate the threat you both pose to Mother with your shortcomings.”

“You want to…what, now?” Mami balked. “Charlotte, why are we listening to this vile creature? How do you know it hasn’t lied to us? We can’t trust it!”

“Rude! Mother most certainly would not approve of you using such uncouth language to refer to her most humble and devoted servant!” the corpse huffed in mock-offence, the grin widening. “Someone needs an attitude adjustment~! But how shall we do this, dear Loki? Elementary, dear Loki! Ingenious, in fact! Why, it’s just as the good book says! Spare the rod…”

“…spoil the child.”

And then Mami knew no more.

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

It was morning, and a ceiling she did not recognise hung over her head. She blinked slowly as her senses returned to her, leaving her with a few certainties: firstly, that her sister was alive in the city; secondly, that she was in danger; thirdly, she had a second sister, and finally, as an addendum, that second sister, who happened to be the prince, was her only hope of snatching their remaining sister from the jaws of horror. But before she could even truly get out of the bed the Warriors of Light’s lodgings provided for them, the person whose voice she least wanted to hear right then speared through her skull like the white-hot knife of a migraine.

` “I believe this is what you would call a ‘bruh’ moment?” Dorothea remarked, her voice so full of cheek Mami was surprised her mouth still worked and hadn’t been replaced with a mound of rosy, solid flesh.

Needless to say, Mami was in no mood for such tomfoolery. “Shut it.”

“Whatever you say, Stone Cold Steve Austin,” came the other woman’s easy retort.

Mami paused to consider, curse, cringe, and other c words that she thought might behoove her to see to before responding. “…Okay, I might have impaired judgement when I’m drunk, but not impaired memory. I know I didn’t tell you about him, so how the ever-living fuck did you learn about that?!”

“I didn’t,” Dorothea shrugged, her grin broad enough to make the Cheshire Cat look dour by comparison. “I suppose the name just reminds me of the sound glass makes when it shatters.”

“I…”

“Would it help if I said it was the voices in my head?” she continued, almost as though Mami hadn’t spoken at all, though the insufferably smug pleasure in her voice was indication enough of her awareness that she was successfully getting under the white mage’s skin. “Because, you know, they council me and understand. They talk to me.”

“One day, I will stab you. I’m not sure when or how, but it will happen.”

“Then that’s the bottom line, because Dorothea said so!” she cried bombastically with a dramatic bow.

“Eat a dick.”